by Rik Smits
All this suggests that human beings are simply not cut out to handle nuances, since our way of thinking is based on dualism and dichotomy. Perhaps our approach has to do with the fact that there are two sexes, or maybe it arises from the distinction between the self and the rest of the world. It may have its origins in something else entirely, but the fact is that we start out by attempting to reduce any complex matter to a distinction that lies within a single dimension, imaginable as a line. We then pick a criterion and use it to chop that line in two. Every phenomenon and every property of nature is dealt with in this way: vertical length is divided into tall and short; bulk into thick and thin; time into early and late. It’s no different with man-made concepts that don’t exist in the natural world. Things are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, true or false.
Triality is unknown. There’s no obvious concept of the same order to set beside true and false, or high and low. Even dealing with two dimensions at the same time, such as breadth and depth, is too much for our simple brains. What do we mean by a balcony that’s a metre and a half wide? It could be a robust structure projecting a generous metre and a half out from the wall, or a measly strip of decking attached to just a metre and a half of the facade. We learn to cope with ambiguities like this, but we always have to give them a moment’s conscious thought and we regularly make mistakes, which estate agents are happy to repeat, or indeed exploit.
Of course we wouldn’t get far if we were capable only of thinking in crude dichotomies, but we can refine our world view considerably by dividing one of two parts into two again. For example, once we’ve made a distinction between edible and non-edible things, we can split the first category into ‘tasty’ and ‘foul’. Division is a recursive process; you can go on bifurcating the result time and again. Fortunately this means that a primitive splitting method is all we need to build up an extremely fine-grained picture of the world.
Not all such dichotomies are of the same kind. Most split the aspect of the world to which we apply them into two parts of random size. For most people, the category ‘edible things’ will contain far more foods they like than foods they dislike. This type of division does not tell us anything about the content of the two parts: one person regards braised pig’s stomach as a delicacy and shudders at the thought of a hamburger; another has precisely the opposite reaction. Any vegetarian worth his salt will turn up his nose at either. So people who apply this kind of distinction decide for themselves exactly what belongs on one side or the other and therefore how large each category will be.
As well as this sort of arbitrary dichotomy there are symmetrical divisions that always by definition produce two parts of roughly equal size, and where demands can be made of the characteristics of each half independently of the person making the split. Examples include front-back and top-bottom. The top part of a person runs roughly from the crown to the navel, never from the crown to the knees. The bottom part of a dog contains everything from its toes to an imaginary line running more or less from its breast bone to its anus. The tail, for example, does not typically belong to the lower half of a dog even if it hangs down. Something similar applies to front and back. Here too we divide a person, animal or thing into two halves of roughly equal size.
With most inherently fifty-fifty divisions, the content of the two halves will differ in a clear and important sense. A ball does not have a top or a back, simply because there is no demonstrable difference between one part of a ball and another. If we do talk about the back of a ball, we don’t mean any specific part but simply the bit that happens to be invisible from our point of view at that particular moment. Trees have a clear and inherent top and bottom; even if we turn a tree upside down, the roots, or the trunk, still belong to the lower part. But a tree, like a ball, does not have a true back and front of its own.
The pair left and right are a special case of this kind of division. Most living creatures visible to the naked eye exhibit a clear distinction between their upper and lower halves, both in the functions concentrated there and in appearance. Most animals, and almost all vertebrates, have a front and back that are clearly differentiated. Those two dimensions are easy to recognize according to explicit criteria. Gravity defines the vertical dimension, while front and back correlate with ‘towards us’ and ‘away from us’. The side we’re looking at as something moves towards us is called its front and as it moves away from us we see its back. In the case of immovable objects, the front is the side we normally see when we move towards them. So the front of a house is on the street side where, as a visitor, you ring the bell. The front of a dog or a ship is what we see as they approach us; the back of a drill is the part we’re facing as we push the thing into a plank or a wall.
No such criteria exist when it comes to left and right, which explains why we have difficulty with them as a conceptual duo. Animals and plants are generally symmetrical as far as their left-right axis goes, although this is not at all the same thing as the dull uniformity without qualities that’s a feature of the surface of a ball. As a rule the right and left halves are outwardly almost complete opposites, yet they differ only by a hair. Our one-handedness proves that uniformity is not the same thing as equivalence. Since human beings are born splitters, it’s no wonder we’re intrigued by this imbalance, nor that left, right and symmetry have become crucially important in such characteristically human products as works of art, handwriting and the symbolism of our world view.
3
Opposites and Contradictions
Deep in the mists of time, more than 3,000 years ago, Greece must have been inhabited by a farming folk that worshipped earth gods, first among them the earth itself, the fruitful mother in whom all life originated. It’s therefore commonly assumed they were a matriarchal people, with a society in which women, bound to Mother Earth, were in charge. However that may be, one ill-fated day Indo-European nomads invaded Greece. These sturdy warriors had little difficulty overrunning the earlier inhabitants, and they entertained very different beliefs. In their experience the earth was relatively unimportant. What mattered to them were the open horizon, travel, hunting and warfare. Their society, far from assigning women a leading role, allowed men to make all the decisions. The world of the gods is always a reflection of the human world, and the Indo-European deities were no exception. They were mostly men, and they personified powers such as the sun, light and wind. They resided not in the warm darkness of the earth but high in the sky.
The invaders settled permanently in their newly conquered lands and slowly merged with what remained of the original population. After a while, the only traces left of the drama of invasion were stories, and no one any longer had any clue how much of what they told each other was true and how much invented. So as time went on history turned into mythology. People became heroes, and heroes gradually assumed divine proportions.
Something similar happened with the contrasting worlds of the old and new gods. Religions are tenacious, so instead of disappearing, all kinds of elements from the ancient earth-god faiths were merged into the new panoply of Indo-European gods. In classical mythology this process left its mark in the strange and sometimes contradictory family relationships between the many gods and demigods.
The result was a bipolar divine world, dominated by the Olympian gods of heaven headed by their father Zeus but including other important and even more ancient divinities such as the earth-shaker Poseidon, Demeter the goddess of fertility – whose name literally means Mother Earth – and Hades, ruler of the subterranean kingdom of dead souls. Various other ancient cults, such as the worship of the moon goddess Cybele, failed to gain such a prominent place for themselves within the ‘official’ religion. Gradually, surviving at the margins, they acquired the character of secret societies, which were naturally seen as untrustworthy. They had to be rooted out, even though as time went on no one any longer knew why. An important consequence of this was that darkness, femininity, the earth and fertility became closely as
sociated with intangible mystery, menace, wickedness and magic.
The Indo-Europeans, who came from somewhere in the Near East, didn’t all end up in Greece but spread out across Europe and Western Asia, migrating as far as the Indian subcontinent. Every-where they settled they imposed their norms and values, and again and again these were merged with the remnants of the cultures they had conquered. Right across that vast region, mythologies and religions grew up that in essence had a great deal in common. Whether known by his Greek name of Zeus or, as in Sanskrit, Dyaus Pitar – a name we encounter again in Latin as Jupiter – or, as the Germanic tribes called him, Tiu, the god of gods is always a man. He is the father who sits in majesty high in the sky, associated with the sun, thunder and lightning, and other phenomena of the heavens. Opposing him are the subterranean powers of darkness. They are usually rather suspect and they always take second place, but that certainly doesn’t make them insignificant.
The Christian evangelists and missionaries who arrived to convert Europe centuries later had a good deal of fun with all this. They too brought with them a God the father in heaven, and it’s surely no coincidence that he too had a tendency to throw bolts of lightning. The foundations had already been laid, in the form of self-evident symbolism in which the concepts of man, master, good, light and heaven belonged together as they do in Christianity. It was easy for the concept of the Devil to develop out of the opposite pole, the earthly darkness, and that symbolism survives to this day in Western cultures in all kinds of ways – in baby clothes, for example, with boys in blue, the colour of the firmament, and girls in pink, associated with blood and the earth.
When the first philosophers, the scientists of this misty antiquity, attempted to understand the phenomena they saw around them, they had no tradition on which to fall back. Everything had to be invented from scratch, and there were few means available other than the already existing system of religious symbols and the philosophers’ own dualistic intellect, with its ability to split and to polarize. This produced a set of opposites, and with it a set of connections, that seemed to shed light on the way the world was composed.
One of the most prominent of those early scientists was Pythagoras, who founded a philosophical institute in about 530 BC in Croton, a Greek colony on the eastern coast of the heel of Italy. Today Croton is a remote, rather uninspiring provincial town, but in those days it was a hypermodern city, teeming with creative ingenuity. It was so modern and wealthy, in fact, that it hired professional sprinters and wrestlers from far and wide to enable it to triumph repeatedly at the Olympic Games. Sport was so important that it even led to an all-out war between Croton and its rival Sybaris. Meanwhile Pythagoras and his pupils came up with a number of principles of mathematics and what we would now call music theory. As Pythagoras saw it, everything in the world ultimately turned on numbers and on numerical relationships between whole numbers. The length of a lyre string corresponded to its pitch, and a pleasing relationship existed between the lengths of strings of equal thickness and the harmonious combination of tones they produced. Building on that idea, Pythagoras was able to equate highly diverse matters, in essence, with numerical relationships. The number five, for example, represented marriage, the fusion of the smallest even number with the smallest uneven number larger than one: marriage paired three with two, man with woman, uneven with even.
Croton had its own ideas about all this and they were far from positive. Eventually Pythagoras was forced to flee the city with his followers and for many years after his death the Pythagoreans were actively persecuted. So we cannot credit those ancient sports fanatics of the Italian peninsula for ensuring that some of his work would survive. That was left to others, among them an even greater Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics adopted a Table of Opposites compiled by Pythagoras. Some of the contrasts it lists are as follows:
even odd
female male
darkness light
evil good
cold warm
crooked straight
left right
This clearly implies male dominance. Pythagoras regards a man as self-evidently associated with goodness. His counterpart, a woman, is therefore naturally saddled with the opposite of goodness, and this creates a definitive connection between the female and wickedness. In Indo-European cultures, light, the sun and heaven are closely associated with the dominant, male divinities, while darkness and the earth traditionally belong on the female side. Its primeval connection with the female cycle and its marking of important dates in the agricultural calendar ensure that the moon, which shines at night, fits perfectly into this scheme of things.
Now it becomes clear why cold and female are on the same side. light and the sun, and therefore warmth, are associated with maleness; therefore cold must inevitably belong on the same list as female. It’s slightly harder to understand the placing of crooked and straight, but one possible explanation is that to the naked eye there are hardly any straight lines in nature. Straight things are typically man-made. A great deal of effort was required to make an object neat and straight, and if anything went wrong with a piece of work then it turned out crooked. This almost inevitably meant that if something was straight it must be good, since otherwise no one would take so much trouble over it. So straight belonged in the same group as good and was therefore associated with men, while crooked ended up in the same category as women.
Even in this very early symbolic system, the right is on the side of good. For a long time this was thought to have something to do with sun worship. Many ancient peoples orientated themselves towards the east, where the sun rises. In the Arab world this holds true even today. If the east is at the top of a map, then the south, where the sun ensures warmth and light, is to the right. It has been argued that this made the south the good direction, associated with warmth, light, divine assistance and so forth. Polarization did the rest.
Yet this explanation cannot be correct. After all, in the southern hemisphere the sun, although still travelling from east to west, passes to the north rather than the south, so left ought to be regarded as the good side, which is certainly not the case. As far as left and right are concerned, beliefs are no different in the southern hemisphere.
The fact that all over the world people divide things the same way – left for evil and female, right for good and male – suggests that there must be another reason: the dominance of both right-handedness and the male. Right-handers form a large majority of all known peoples. This is enough in itself to explain why the right is more likely than the left to be connected with goodness, since it places most people on the side of good. Furthermore, almost all peoples are patriarchal, so if right is associated with the good then it must also be associated with the male, and with the gods, who are good, or in the case of the Jews with that one nameless god who will tolerate no others. The name by which we still know his great adversary, Satan, is a corruption of the Talmudic Samael, a name derived from the word se’mol, meaning left.*
It is ironic that the left became automatically associated with the female, since left-handedness occurs slightly more often in men than in women. It could to a minuscule degree be called a male characteristic. No one seems to have noticed this. Clearly we don’t much care whether a view of the world that arises from a symbolic system fits with our actual experience. What matters is the illusion that we comprehend and therefore rule the world, rather than the idea that we have a convincing description of it. We aren’t even bothered by the most absurd contradictions. Pythagoras’ table, for instance, links women with cold and darkness, the typical characteristics of death, even though the female continues as ever to symbolize fertility and the source of new life. Symbolic systems create order out of the chaos of the world without necessarily entailing anything beyond themselves.
Yet down through the centuries these symbolic systems have unquestionably influenced the way in which we look at the world, and they continue to do so. They form the basis for deepl
y rooted traditional norms. Women have encountered great difficulties as a result, but so, to a lesser extent, have the left-handed. Some cultures have a real taboo against the left, especially the left hand. Although in large swathes of Europe a person who eats with his left hand can expect nothing worse than a few strange looks, in other cultures, including those of the Islamic world, such behaviour is utterly unacceptable.
* The Latin word sinister, by contrast, gained its dismal connotation only later. The word is derived from sinus, a fold on the left side of the Roman toga that served as a pocket. Sinister originally meant simply ‘on the pocket side’.
4
Taboos, Sex and Handicrafts
In Arab countries the left and right hands have different functions. There too the great majority of people are right-handed, so traditionally the right hand is called upon to do the most important jobs, such as eating, writing and greeting others. The left hand exists to do the opposite, including the dirty work, like the cleaning of the anus. In a culture where people generally eat with their hands, such a division is in fact quite rational, all the more so in the warm climates where Islam has its origins and its greatest distribution. But people will be people, and nothing invites violation so much as a ban based on rational considerations. A taboo works far better, a prohibition grounded in indefinable fear. A taboo it therefore became. The left hand is the unclean hand.
Some claim that within the Islamic world the unclean left hand is intended for the game of love. It’s impossible to find any reliable confirmation of this, and anyhow it seems an improbable story. For a start, rules for hand use are a matter of etiquette – you need to learn which tasks you’re forbidden to perform with the hand you favour – but it holds true in both European and Islamic countries that the more traditional a belief system is, the more people act as if sex doesn’t exist. In the worst case, which is not to say there’s anything rare about such things, you’re not allowed even to look at girls, so you’re hardly likely to be told by someone else which hand to put up your wife or girlfriend’s skirt. The same applies the other way around. No decent girl touches a boy with either her right hand or her left. So one taboo obstructs the spread of another.