Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leonard Shlain is the author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. He is the chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco.

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The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Penguin Books

Chapter One

IMAGE/WORD

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

--Galileo

Even a positive thing casts a shadow.... its unique excellence is at the same time its tragic flaw.

--William Irwin Thompson

    Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, feware as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable thatin the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerouspoets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs.Sophocles once warned, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without acurse." The invention of writing was vast; this book will investigate the curse.

    There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written wordexperiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can becharacterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gonelargely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writingof any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values andwith them, women's power in the culture. The reasons for this shift will beelaborated in the coming pages. For now, I propose that a holistic,simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are theessential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential,reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine. Althoughthese represent opposite perceptual modes, every individual is generouslyendowed with all the features of both. They coexist as two closely overlappingbell-shaped curves with no feature superior to its reciprocal.

    These complementary methods of comprehending reality resemble theancient Taoist circle symbol of integration and symmetry in which the tensionbetween the energy of the feminine yin and the masculine yang isexactly balanced. One side without the other is incomplete; together, theyform a unified whole that is stronger than either half. First writing, and thenthe alphabet, upset this balance. Affected cultures, especially in the West,acquired a strong yang thrust.

    In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan proposed that a civilization's principalmeans of communication molds it more than the content of thatcommunication. McLuhan classified speech, pictographs, ideographs, alphabets,print, radio, film, and television as distinctive information-conveyingmedia, each with its own technology of transmission. He declared that thesetechnologies insinuate themselves into the collective psyche of any societythat uses them, and once embedded, stealthily exert a powerful influence oncultural perceptions.

    McLuhan's aphorism, "the medium is the message" is the leitmotif ofthis book. Robert Logan, the author of The Alphabet Effect, expounded onthis idea:

A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. A person who is literate has a different world view than one who receives information exclusively through oral communication. The alphabet, independent of the spoken languages it transcribes or the information it makes available, has its own intrinsic impacts.

While McLuhan, Logan, and others have explored many of the effects thatalphabetic literacy has had upon Western history, I wish to narrow the focusto a single question: how did the invention of the alphabet affect the balanceof power between men and women?

    The proposition that the alphabet has hindered women's aspirationsand accomplishments seems, at first glance, to be antithetical to historicalfacts. Western society, based on the rule of law and constitutional government,has increasingly affirmed the dignity of the individual, and in the lastfew centuries Western women have won rights and privileges not availablein many other cultures. Most people believe that the benefits that haveaccrued to women are due primarily to a high level of education among thepopulace. But a study of the origins of writing in less complex times thousandsof years ago reveals how writing, first, and then the alphabet, alteredthe balance of power to women's detriment.

    Anthropological studies of non-literate agricultural societies show that,for the majority, relations between men and women have been more egalitarianthan in more developed societies. Researchers have never provenbeyond dispute that there were ever societies in which women had powerand influence greater than or even equal to that of men. Yet, a diverse varietyof preliterate agrarian cultures--the Iroquois and the Hopi in NorthAmerica, the inhabitants of Polynesia, the African !Kung, and numerousothers around the world--had and continue to have considerable harmonybetween the sexes.

    Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the very few scholars tochallenge literacy's worth.

There is one fact that can be established: the only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing ... is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the population is made to work for the other part.

Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all butthe very recent history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fallwith the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.

    The key to my thesis lies in the unique way the human nervous systemdeveloped, which in turn allowed alphabets to profoundly affect genderrelations. The introductory chapters will explore why and how we evolved inthe manner we did. In later chapters, I will reinterpret a number of mythsand historical events, making correlations based on circumstantial evidence.Correlation, however, does not prove causality--the disappearance of thestars at dawn does not cause the sun to rise. As we examine various sets offacts, I will appeal, therefore, to the court of what archaeologists callcompetitive plausibility, and I will ask the reader to consider with mewhich of the hypothetical explanations of historical events is the mostplausible.

Although each of us is born with a unique set of genetic instructions, weenter the world as a work-in-progress and await the deft hand of the ambientculture to sculpt the finishing touches. Among the two most importantinfluences on a child are the emotional constellation of his or her immediatefamily and the configuration of his or her culture. Trailing a close thirdis the principal medium with which the...