Quote from: Nichole on February 13, 2008, 11:28:05 AM
Mine matches. I tend toward right-brained abilities. Always have. Never much anlyticall, big-picture rather than detail oriented, nurture over power, communion rather than agency. So it goes.
The book I finished reading a few weeks ago theorizes that as our culture becomes more 'imagistic' we will all tend toward valuing the traditional 'feminine styles' over the currently declining masculine. He maintains the difference is in the linearity required by script decoding and the non-linearity required for image decoding.
Called The Alphabet and the Goddess. It was an interesting and good read, by a medical doctor no less.
N~
1. Near the start of the book, he says he is going to survey the available explanations for the historical developments he traces, and show why his theory is the one that explains the historical facts the best. He doesn't do this. His general approach is to show how some "bad" development followed immediately on the introduction of an alphabetic form of writing, or the printing press, or an increase in literacy. Although he says that he understands the difference between correlation and causality, in the end, he mostly presents correlations in time.
2. Along the same lines, he fails to provide any cogent analysis of what is wrong with competing theories for the rising dominance of men in Western society (he mentions the horticulture-to-agriculture shift theory, but simply dismisses it without explaining why this explanation is wrong or incomplete).
3. He takes odd little detours. I never did figure out what the chapter on Ganymede and Sappho had to do with his thesis.
4. By the end of the book, the chapters became tediously repetitious. Basically, each one consisted of a description of some heinous development in Western culture, the establishment of some time-based correlation between this development and an increase in literacy, followed by the assertion that this was further proof that alphabets cause horrible problems.
5. His entire premise relies on the equation of left brain with masculine (and thus with males), versus the right brain with feminine (and thus with females). He fails to distinguish between the social constructs of masculine/feminine and biological sex. He ignores all the studies which show that the differences within each sex (on this masculine/feminine scale) are far greater than between the sexes.
6. Whenever he encounters a woman who thrives in a "masculine" environment, he adduces this as evidence of that particular woman being co-opted by the over-emphasis on the left brain. He never seems to question the degree to which his thesis is affected by the culture in which he is located -- to what degree can he universalize a theory tied so deeply to a particular notion of masculine and feminine that come so cleary from the time and place in which he lives.
Interestingly, Shalin seems to recognize the irony of his entire project (using alphabet-based writing and logical thinking to debunk the same...). Therefore, he occasionally makes a point of saying that alphabets aren't *all* bad. It's just that whenever there's an increase in alphabetic literacy, then there is a corresponding social disruption.
In the end I found the book to be based on an interesting idea, but altoghter too dogmatic in expounding the idea. And this dogmatism makes the argument ultimately unpersuasive to me.
