Apparently the anti-feminist crowd have only just discovered Leonard Shlain’s ridiculous book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. That’s odd because it was published in 1998; I remember finding it in a bookstore and skimming through it and laughing a disdainful laugh. That was before I had a blog to do my laughing on!
There’s an article about it on this Amazon-linked site.
Shlain frames the premise:
Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . . One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.
He defines the feminine outlook as a “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world” and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist” one characterized by abstract thinking, while recognizing — as Susan Sontag did decades earlier in condemning our culture’s artificial polarities— that “every individual is generously endowed with all the features of both.”
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck off. It’s just the same old shit, you jackass, dressed up as nicer and more spirachool. There is no “feminine outlook” and that “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic” crap is just another way of saying too stupid to think clearly.
Shlain writes:
They coexist as two closely overlapping bell-shaped curves with no feature superior to its reciprocal. These complementary methods of comprehending reality resemble the ancient Taoist circle symbol of integration and symmetry in which the tension between the energy of the feminine yin and the masculine yang is exactly balanced. One side without the other is incomplete; together, they form a unified whole that is stronger than either half. First writing, and then the alphabet, upset this balance. Affected cultures, especially in the West, acquired a strong yang thrust.
You know who else talks like that? The Vatican.
What is especially interesting is that Shlain was writing in 1998, when the internet as we know it — a medium that lends text and image seemingly equal gravitas — was in its infant stage. The golden age of web video was nearly a decade away, as was the invention of the smartphone camera and its constant connection to the web. Could it be that the world wide web, especially the image-heavy ecosystem of social sharing, would emerge as an equalizer of gender dynamics?
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Nope!
He sounds like he wants to give something a strong yang thrust.
As soon as I hit the word “holistic”, my brain turned off. It’s a self-defense response, usually cells are going to die if I keep reading. I have to keep my eyes on the road every time we drive by the “Holistic Health Center” on the way to the ferry dock, where you can get acupuncture, naturopathy, and, of course, chiropractic.
Is he saying the goons who shot Malala are right and we shouldn’t teach girls to read?
Literacy is a “sacred cow”? Literacy?
Now I’ve heard everything.
The whole premise is so bizarre I’m surprised he was able to write whole book on this. He must have a whole lot of anecdotes to prove he is an idiot.
Also, pencils, pens, brushes, and styluses are shaped like penises. (More than they’re shaped like vaginas, anyway.) For the sake of equality, we should write by squeezing ink out of coin wallets for the next several millennia.
“By profession, I am a surgeon… I am by nature a storyteller,” Shlain tells us,”
Presumably his skills as a surgeon allow him to make a definitive analysis of pre-history and archeology–5/5 stars for chutzpah. I doubt that Gimbutas’ “Universal Goddess” theories are as widely accepted as Shlain seems to believe.
“Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.”
So on this hypothesis, the social status of women in traditional Chinese culture should be superior to their counterparts in the West since the Chinese writing system is logographic and West’s is alphabetical.
Uhhhhh. Let’s do the time-warp again?
Because, as we all know, cultures with non-alphabetic languages were much less patriarchal…right?
Another guy telling us how women think and are. How radical.
A. Noid
These ungrateful feminists didn’t appreciate it when BIC troed to solve all the world’s problems of gender inequality with a pink pen…
The assertion on dyslexia seems to be incorrect, says 9:1 ratio and looking online figures vary from 10:1 -> 1:1, with more recent results tending to say the difference is 2-3:1, some saying there is no difference. It’s an interesting one though as a lot of studies do seem to show a big difference. Not something I’d expect given the research on brain differences usually show little differentiation. The reduction over time however does fit my feminist bias as I’d expect the focus on boys education to show up more problems with reading while the girls are taught to just be quiet and accept they are just “stupid”. Wonder if the 1:1 figures are nearer the truth, or is there a real difference here?
Should be working but the dyslexia thing is interesting. This study seems to imply that most stats rely on the reporting from schools etc. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528651/) That is biased and therefore flawed, whereas their objective measure of dyslexia (Also flawed tho) showed roughly the same results in girls and boys, with girls much less likely to be picked up on and treated for their dyslexia.
Only one study but I’d be interested to see what studies that attempt to correct for reporting bias find.
Sorry, pedantic point: Non-alphabetic scripts. Your point is, of course, quite valid.
I remember that book.
Bleh.
My mom was just looking for that book when I visited them last. She’s probably burned through the trilogy now.
And, of course, the book would be just as stupid if the author was female. All the waffly ‘holistic’ babble might have found a little more audience had that been the case. But I suspect not. Maybe the interwebs have helped create a society with slightly less appetite for stupidity.
Pretty sure I read something by Sandra Harding arguing binary notation was sexist because it privileges the ‘phallic’ 1 over the ‘vulvic’ 0
Derrida also argued that writing came before speech.
Postmodernists tend to talk bollocks.
I had quite a bit to say about Sandra Harding in Why Truth Matters. (It wasn’t…flattering.)
Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges. The meaning of a sentence, such as the one you are now reading, progresses word by word. Comprehension depends on the sentence’s syntax, the particular horizontal sequence in which its grammatical elements appear. The use of analysis to break each sentence down into its component words, or each word down into its component letters, is a prime example of reductionism. This process occurs at a speed so rapid that it is below awareness. An alphabet by definition consists of fewer than thirty meaningless symbols that do not represent the images of anything in particular; a feature that makes them abstract. Although some groupings of words can be grasped in an all-at-once manner, in the main, the comprehension of written words emerges in a one-at-a-time fashion.
The guy’s a fucking idiot.
You don’t make sense of a sentence one word at a time: that’s how automated messages like the speaking clock work:
The / time / is / six / forty / two / and / twelve / seconds / beep / beep / beep
But that’s not how most people speak and it’s definitely not how we write: we use embedded relative clauses. You have to read the entire sentence before you can parse it: and because we get to reread a sentence we use more relative clauses in the written word.
Words which come later in a sentence change the meaning of words which appeared earlier:
”Shlain is a genius – NOT!”
See what I mean? If your linguistic model can’t cope with Wayne’s World you’re in trouble.
Anyone can parse the sentence “The man I saw yesterday wasn’t there today”; if Shlain’s linguistic model was true you’d need two sentences: ”I saw a man yesterday. The man was not there today”. That’s how robots talk in B-movies.
And I bet most people here can parse “Isn’t it true that example-sentences that people that you know produce are more likely to be accepted?” even if they have to take a couple of passes at it.
And how the hell does a correlation between dyslexia and boys back up the claim the written word privileges men?
That’s like citing a correlation between autism and boys as proof that non-verbal communication privileges men.
This guy makes my head hurt.
And with some languages (I’m thinking of Latin) word order is used mostly for emphasis or aesthetics, meaning is mostly conveyed by suffixes. You have to read a whole sentence usually to get what’s being said (especially since the end is a great place to put the word you want to stand out).
And then you get the Germanic version of the subordinate clause, where the verb comes at the end of the clause and so you can’t know the meaning of the rest of the clause until you get there.
There are lots of jokes about absent-minded German professors who rattle off a single run-on sentence for five minutes and then ‘pop the stack’ of ten different verbs at the end of it, one for each of the nested subordinate clauses.
Or, for that matter, some really odd subtleties that show up. In French, ‘un homme grand’ is a big man, but ‘un grand homme’ is a great man. Normally in French, adjectives come after the noun they’re describing, but there are a few odd cases like ‘grand’ there…
One need not look back 2000 years to find inflection-heavy languages. There are plenty in central and eastern Europe: most Slavic languages, Finnish, Hungarian, etc. Though most of them have a neutral word order, as Latin does, they also allow rearranging words for effect, with order (old information) (new information).
Shatterface (#18)
Yeah, when it comes to pronunciation, words in English are much less discrete than our writing conventions suggest. For instance, native speakers don’t generally say “time” and “is” separately when they’re in sequence. We say (depending on dialect) “tie” and then “miz.” (Linking is one of those things that makes me super glad I’m a native English speaker.)
Or consider the phrase “stopped up.” I say it “stop tup.” The “ed” gets attached to the next word and devoiced. What actually happens in cases like this is that we read the “ed” as symbolic of past tense and apply certain rules to supply one of several possible sounds indicating past tense.
To make it even more complicated, “stopped up” could be an a prepositional verb or a verb followed by a separate preposition depending on the sentence where it appears. In “I stopped up the sink with a moldy tomato,” “up” is part of the verb. In “I stopped up the road from a terrible accident,” “up” is part of the following prepositional phrase. The “I stopped up” in one is completely different from “I stopped up” in the other, yet we can’t tell which is which until we see the words that come after. Furthermore, we cannot tell which is which from basic syntax; the same parts of speech are in the same order in both.
Basically all of Japanese works like this since it’s a subject-object-verb language and negation comes after the verb stem. Also, the equivalents of English phrases like “it was not the case that” or “in my opinion” or “most likely” come at the very end, after even the verbs. Japanese is all about the plot twists.
Reminded me of:
“The trunks being now ready, he DE– after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED.”
***
Fascinating.