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" Competition between media contributes to the flowering of culture." Harold Innis |
" We must once again accept and harmonize the perceptual biases of both (the left and right brain) and understand that for thousands of years the left hemisphere has suppressed the qualitative judgment of the right, and the human personality has suffered for it." Bruce Powers |
| Sex, Time and Power › Art & Physics › | |||||||||
| Toward the end of the last century, a number of linguists decided that there should be a universal language. They ardently believed that one tongue and a single written language would ameliorate the horrors of nationalistic wars. Being alphabet people, they tried to merge elements of the major European alphabets into one homogenized hybrid.ð They hailed the invention of their new language: Esperanto. The men and women behind the universal language movement could not have known that English, television, and computers would make Esperanto unnecessary. After World War II, the world community of scientists, businessmen, and scholars bowed to the reality of the American century and began to use English as the international language. It was a fortuitous choice for the future, as the English language's gender neutrality will incline world culture toward egalitarianism. But a universal spoken and written language was just one half of the equation: the other is visual images. The sign on the men's room door no longer spells out m-e-n but instead displays an icon of a male figure. In airports and hospitals, directions are presented in symbols rather than words. Highway departments have replaced their text signage with standardized icons. Each day, it seems another complex concept, noun, or verb has been translated into a universal stick figure. We are achieving Esperanto in cartoon form. Since World War II, the technologies of information transfer have transformed the foundations of world culture and, in the process, helped it balance feminine and masculine. Iconic information proliferating through the use of television, computers, photocopiers, fax machines, and the Internet have enhanced, and will continue to enhance, the positions in society of images, women's rights, and the Goddess. The word spell has a variety of meanings. One refers to the sequence of letters in a word; another is about magic and possession. "To cast a spell" means to interfere with the reality perception of the one entranced. The alphabet's thirty-eight-hundred-year "spell" has prevented those who have used it from recognizing the price it has exacted. Linearity, sequence, abstraction, and analysis are the mental processes used in alphabet spelling. They are also the processes that undergird the left hemisphere's most representative functions-language, logic, causality, and math computation. The left is the hemisphere principally responsible for the hunting-and-killing human survival strategy. Literacy preferentially reinforces the left's dominance over the right hemisphere, home of the gathering-and-nurturing human survival strategy. The values of the right hemisphere have suffered for millennia because literacy has literally held cultures that learned spelling "spellbound." In the culture at large, this trance has manifested as misogyny, harsh patriarchy, and a distrust of images that periodically erupts into a destructive anti-art frenzy. I propose that alphabets are the principal reason cultures have reviled goddesses, banned women from conducting religious ceremonies, and ignored or devalued the beauty and beneficence of nature.
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