Voting with your Left or Right Brain

Voting with your Left or Right Brain

[The seventh and last past of the Teeter Totter of the Brain series is coming. Due to the coming election I wanted to get this idea out. I’ll get the last post out in the next week. Then, I’ll go off this brain stuff for a while.]

One side of your brain will probably pull the lever when you vote on November 6. Each side of your brain holds a world view separate from the other. If you are living in the left side of your brain, you will probably vote conservative. If you vote for the liberal ticket, you’re probably using your right brain. This election is as divided as the country; as split the two sides of your brain. If we all continue to live in one side of our brain or the other, we will remain divided.

The front part of our brains is divided into two hemispheres, called the left and right brain. They think differently. It’s not about what they do, but how. It’s about process rather than function. Simply, the left brain focuses on one thing at a time, while the right brain takes in everything at once. These ‘one at a time’ versus ‘all at one time’ processes create conflict. Each side offers unique and necessary abilities; they collaborate on all advanced tasks; and they fight for control. [For more information on this read my series on The Teeter Totter of our Brain.]

The division between the left and right is deeply entwined in our culture. We didn’t know the sides of our brains controlled the opposite sides of the body when we began calling the Republicans the Right and the Democrats the Left otherwise we would have reversed it. In the past thirty years, the liberal/progressives have become more solidly in their right brains, while the conservatives have dug into their left brains.

Voting with your Right Brain

The right brain likes new ideas and multiple solutions. Thinking “all at one time,” it entertains different points of view. It sees the grey area of all arguments. This is the reason the Democratic Party has a hard time getting behind one idea. All ideas should be given consideration.

The right brain argues that since there is not one right way, individuals should have choice. How can we choose for you when there is no such a thing as a right way?

Thinking “all at one time” helps you to see the commonality between yourself and the ‘other.’ You become more accepting. The right brain includes those who have become ‘other’ in the society, including Women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Homosexuals. The right brain embraces this paradox that while you are different you are still part of us. We live in a pluralistic society where the existence of many groups makes up the one society. The right brain is feminine in thinking.

The right brain emphasizes the group over the individual. It promotes that we are all working together to make this country and we must help all of the members. The right brain tends toward socialism and supports systems that allow everyone to be treated the same.

The right brain takes in stimuli from the external world. It supports the evidence of science though is wary of the abstract theories of scientists. It sees itself as a part of and entwined with nature. This drives liberals to fight for the environment.

Voting with your Left Brain

The left brain looks for the right solution and commits to it. It does not like and cannot hold many solutions at one time. It considers each one internally/abstractly and then picks the best course of action. Once a decision is made, the left brain does not to change its mind. It detests flip flopping. It knows that its choice is the right one and everyone needs to get in line. This is one of the reasons the Republican Party does not allow its members to stray from the company line. The Republicans got behind Mitt Romney, now they have to minimize their conflict about his ever changing positions.

The Christian Right and all orthodox monotheistic religions feel at home with left brain thinking. Believing in one God to the exclusion of all others has become very left brained. Since there is one way, individuals don’t need choice. There is the right way and the wrong way. Who would want to choose the wrong way?

The “one at a time” nature of the left brain emphasizes the individual over the group. It was interesting how during this year’s political conventions, the Republicans touted the ‘self-made man’ myth while the Democrats sold the ‘we are all in this together’ myth. It was a classic example of the right-left brain split. The left brain emphasizes the similar and familiar over the different and other. Those who are not part of the inner group are shunned and denigrated.

The left brain is better at math and symbolic numbers than the right brain. It emphasizes the fiscal over the personal. Money becomes an abstract thing in and of itself rather than a symbol for stuff and services. The left brain also loves competition. Put it together with its favorite symbol, money, and you have the left brain’s favorite game: Capitalism.

The left brain is classified as being masculine in thought and practice. It supports the patriarchal dominate system and puts women in their place. The left brain system loves the systems of class structure and gender roles.

The left brain has an odd relationship with science. The scientific method has given rise to the left brain. It loves the abstract thought and worked well with the “one at a time” focus on specific experiment. It can really buy into cause and effect. However, it doesn’t handle the notion of multiple causes well. When confronted with an array of causes, it rejects the theory because it can only focus on one thing at a time. The left brain returns to its preformed, abstract ideology over the multiple evidence of the senses. This is why the left brain has trouble with climate change and evolution even though it had a hand in creating both theories.

Your Right Brain on Left Wing Media

While the political parties might not ever think about their left or right brains, they sure know how please and engage the side of the brain they need to get the vote.

The left wing loves new media – image, sounds, and multiple platforms. You have to use your right brain to entertain new ideas and new technology. And it loves images. Images play on the right brain better than on the left. The rise of the right brain can be attributed to the rise of image over the last century from photographs, to films, to television, to the internet. The rise of the web and smart phones has made the world more interconnected proving the idea we are all the same.

The left wing media knows the parts of language that engage the right brain. Metaphor, irony and humor fill liberal news programs. When that doesn’t clinch it, they go for the empathy. Sadness, joy, desire, hope and possibly even love live in the right brain. You have put yourself in someone else’s place to feel empathy. This requires a mind that can compare two different states and find the commonality. This is very right brained.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a great example of right brain media. It is full of jokes, parody and sarcasm. This language requires a high level of right brain thinking. As he introduces a story an image pops up that usually juxtaposes two images or an image and words. The more the mind is called on compare disjointed ideas, the more the right brain seizes control. The audience is in on the joke. They know it is a comedy show and not a news show. They become part of the insurgency. They are undermining the dominant political paradigm because, well, it’s stupid.

Your Left Brain on Right Wing Media

Right Wing Media prefers old media. They include television though they were wary of it at first, preferring radio and print. They do not like the lack of corporate control over the abundance of media. They attack the new media and raise doubts about its veracity. They tell you that the new media cannot be trusted. The old media, their media, is the only one that is trustworthy.

They emphasize word and language over image. The left brain loves the text crawl because you can’t disengage the left brain if you are constantly being asked to read. They tell you that the news you get from them is not nuanced and lacks spin. These are the straight facts. They tell you to trust them as the source of right thinking.

A good example of this is Fox News. Every news story is urgent, something you must know and understand. They let you know that if you don’t continue to watch you will miss something that could threaten your life. By watching them you are one of the selected, the elite, and the knowledgeable. They speak out against those who would try to take what you have and your country away. They are the ‘other’ and the enemy. They play on fear and anger that dwell primarily in the left brain. Fox News is engineered to be addictive and to increase fear. It plays well with the extremes of the left brain.

Why we are Divided

In the last thirty years, we have become more divided as a country and as a people. The competition between the two sides our brain have teetered and tottered from one side to the other. In the 2000 election, the two sides stood at a knife’s point. The left brain won, barely. The patriarchal, conservative view of the world dominated leading into fear, war and near financial collapse. While the pendulum swung toward the right brain in 2008, we are once again at the knife’s point.  The two sides of the brain see the world differently. It’s like they are living in two parallel universes.

The challenge of our age is to see if we can maintain a balance between the sides of our brains. We need both ways of being to continue to evolve. If the left brain dominates in time we will descend into an autocratic society, a dictatorship, war and, finally, another dark age. If the right continues to grow to overshadow the left, we will descend into anarchy, illiteracy, fiefdoms and end up in another dark age. The middle ground is finding the balance between the two sides, holding the opposites views to be valid and necessary at the same moment.

Before you pull the lever to vote next Tuesday, consider the two sides of your brain. Is one side determining your vote over the other? Is there a vote that balances both?

The Teeter Totter of our Brains, Post 6

The Teeter Totter of our Brains

How Left v. Right Brain Dominance has Created our World

Post 6

[Sorry for the gap between Post 5 and 6. Life got busy. Also, there's this funny thing with writing. The act of writing down my thoughts changed my thoughts on this topic. Is this the tyranny of the left brain over the right? This is the sixth post in a series. There are seven. Yeah, I know it is a big thought. Go to the Introduction if you want to begin at the beginning.]

Before we launch into the 20^th Century, I want to discuss where we were on the eve of the Modern. The left brain came up to match the right in the 16^th century giving us the Renaissance. It didn’t stop there. It kept moving to surpass the right brain. A leading left brain gave us huge advancements. The right brain kept it in check and also gave us many counter-culture movements including the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Transcendentalists. However, the left brain kept taking over.

One good example of this trend was how the Enlightenment transitioned into the French Revolution. The ideas of enlightenment on the surface feel very left brained. Reason and Science would reform society putting aside superstition, prejudice and the abuses of the church and state. The analytical and abstract left brain would combat the loose thinking and hyper-imaginative right brain. Reason would take charge. Science, including the social sciences, would be our salvation. Interestingly, the ideas of the Enlightenment contained such right brained ideas such as all men being created equal, a return to democracy, and human rights. You have to have the right brain playing along to see all things as equal. The Enlightenment is a good example of the two sides of the brain working in concert.

As the ideas of the Enlightenment took root and grew to the French Revolution, the movement was co-opted by the left brained. The good ideas became rigid. Equality was replaced by intolerance and violence. Anyone who continued to question (the very act that got it going) was dispatched using the most efficient killing invention of the day, the guillotine.

The Guillotine is a funny symbol. It kills by separating the head from the body. The thought that the brain contained the mind of the person was relatively new. Until the 17^th century, the seat of the mind was the center of the body, the solar plexus. As the cognitive intellect developed, the emphasis became directed on the brain in the head over the mind of the body.[i] The ideas of the Enlightenment emphasized the intellect over the body. And yet, taken to the dogmatic extremes of the Reign of Terror thought became the crime rather than actions. Thinking got us here, but in time correct thinking as prescribed by the ruling group was differentiated from the consideration of all ideas. It was like, “Thank you for coming up with the ideas to start the revolution, we’ll take it from here. We don’t need new thoughts anymore, so stop thinking or we will cut you off.” This is a prime example of conversation the dominant left brain is having with the right brain. It’s funny that the popular means of execution became cutting the head from the body.[ii]

Hegel’s Dialectic in many ways describes the teeter totter of the left and right brain. It also describes the Modern way to synthesis the conflict between opposites, whether they be ideas or the two sides of the brain. His three dialectical stages of development or thesis being challenged by a negative, argument, opposite or antithesis is the common state which Hamlet spoke of in his “To be or not to be” speech. Hegel’s very Modern resolution to this conflict was a compromise or synthesis. The challenge is that a synthesis often negates both the thesis and the synthesis and waters them down losing their potency and relevance.

[While this route is what I’d call the model of Modern thinking, later I will posit that our new challenge is hold the opposites of the thesis and antithesis as both being valid and necessary to hold as bother being true at the same moment. Rather than forcing a synthesis, we need to generate an ambi-thesis.]

Hegel often described another way to view his Dialectic as the movement from Abstract to Negative to Concrete. This pathway describes the natural learning occurring between the two hemispheres in a clearer way.

Another example of the left brain inventing the Modern was in the rise of the individual over the group; differentiation over integration. The developing archetype became the myth of the lone cowboy who rode in on his horse and to clean up the town or the myth of the self-made man who went from rags to riches without help from others. “Living by their wits” became the phrase of the day. These myths became the source material of the American Dream. They are the sign of a left brain thinking that the individual is disconnected from the group.  It’s no surprise that the lone hero revealed his shadow side and became the antihero as we moved into the 20^th century.[iii][iv]

In the late 19^th Century, western man grew to believe that he was the master of the natural world. He explored, invented and conquered. It was a time of great engineering. As Canals divided the continents, the telegraph connected them in ways that were unimaginable a few years before. Power was harnessed to light the cities, explorers travelled to the poles and the far reaches of this earth, finance surpassed industry, and learning was further codified in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary. A dominant left brain with a creative right brain in support could get you far.[v]

Late 19^th Century man knew he was the master of his universe. He understood how his world worked. He explained the workings of God’s plan. He introduced new inventions in the home, on the street and at work. He anticipated the new Century as his coming zenith. He could not predict how much was about to change.

4: The Modern Era and the coming Next

The Renaissance shifted us out of the Medieval and on the road to the Modern. In the last century we culminated the four century journey into the Modern and began the shift to the next. Whether the Modern climaxed at the turn of the last century; or with the First World War when many felt everything changed; or with dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, we finally arrived in the Modern.

No sooner did we arrive than we began the transition to the Next. Prior to the 20^th Century, the modern artists and physicists began to signal that the world worked differently than we had previously thought. Monet, Manet, Renoir and the other Impressionists all suggested light and space work differently than we previously thought. The haystack will look differently on different days and at different times. How I see also depends on me. Paintings of the haystack must change to reflect what I see.

The Post-Impressionist and Modern artists expanded our view of the world. When you look at Cezanne, everything starts to fall off of the canvas. Gauguin goes back to the primitive to rediscover a true right brain-centric world. Van Gogh gives us images of lights and colors that make everything more real and more abstract at the same moment and Picasso just plays with our mind showing us what it all might look like if we can release our conventional view of the world. The Art was inexplicable, but so was the Science and Physics, and they were singing the same song in different keys.[vi]

Darwin came out and told us that we had evolved from the apes.  All life had evolved from single cells through a mechanism of survival of the fittest.  This idea rocked our world. Then, Freud came out and said it isn’t about what is happening out there, but what it is happening inside the mind that makes us who we are. Our dreams, subconscious and unconscious were guiding us more than our natural world. Einstein told us that the motion and vantage point of the observer is as important as the observed. Everything is relative to the observer. All that we had been told about the world is wrong. These ideas were radical and many rejected them violently. Others knew intuitively that the world was different than previously understood.

The quantum physicists pushed the envelope more. They told us that until we observe something it can be in two different states at the same time, the uncertainty principle. Also, the very act of our observation effects the observed causing entanglement. An electron can behave both like a wave and a particle depending on how you look at it. Time wraps in on itself. All time is happening at the same time. There might be parallel times and universes. Things are no longer fixed. Light particles bend. When an electron jumps it disappears and connects with everything else in the universe. Matter is not solid and might not be real at all. These ideas on the surface are nuts. Even they say that if you say you understand quantum physics, you are lying.

(Notice there is a similarity between what these scientists and artists were saying and what the people in the primitive and medieval eras believed about our world. If I’m calling this new age the Four, it matches the Zero and Two eras. The evens match and the odds are the same because the evens have been right brain dominant and the odds are left brain dominant.)

We moved from writing with one hand to typing. Most people are right handed making the physical act of writing left brained. Imagine the impact when we went from using one hand and one side of our brain to communicate to typing, writing with both hands and both sides of our brain. This very act and invention might be the cause of the ascending right brain as much as the invention of the printing press caused the left brained rising Renaissance and Modern era.

We went from occasionally hearing music, most of our own making, to listening to phonographs and radio. We went from a seeing a few handmade paintings and drawings to being immersed in millions of photographic images. We went from seeing a couple of plays a year and maybe a dozen vaudeville shows (if you were lucky and didn’t believe it a sin) to the unending flicker of light and story on the screen with the advent of films and television. The personal computer followed by the World Wide Web has given us multiple images and sounds all that we controlled with our two hands. Our activities have become more about the aural sound and the visual image rather than the written word.[vii]

This technology depends on the right brain more than the left. In response, the right brain has ascended to challenge the modern supremacy of the left brain. This is the first time this has happened in recorded time. In the decline from the classical era to the dark ages, it was the left hemisphere that receded to beneath the level of the right, not the right ascending. What’s happening now is new.

The remarkable changes of the last century were caused by this new balance between the two hemispheres as the right developed to challenge the left. However, this has caused a conflict between the two hemispheres for supremacy. We are sitting in that conflict of opposite views of our world and how we should live. How we resolve this battle will effect what happens Next and what the conclusion of the section will address.

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[i] The right brain considers impulse and the entire body. The left brain, other than its obligatory control over right side body functioning, does not consider the rest of the body. In experiments with split brain patients (a person whose brain has been surgically or chemically separated to divide the two hemispheres, usually to relieve the damage of epilepsy) the left brain does not even acknowledge the left side of the body as being part of itself. The right brain encompasses the whole body. So, the right brain is ready to include the whole body as part of the conscious mind. The left brain thinks it can go it alone. From here we get characters such as: the evil Doctor who is only a brain in a jar and Darth Vadar

[ii] Edward O. Wilson has a great chapter that emphasizes this in his book CONSILIENCE: The Unity of Knowledge. It follows the rise and fall of the Marquis de Condorcet, whose ideas led the revolution until he found himself on the wrong sides of the guillotine.

[iii] It is amusing how persistent this idea is. In our current, presidential competition one side is emphasizing the work of the independent entrepreneur building their business without the help of anyone versus the assertion by the other side that no one builds a business or anything without the collaboration with others, including the government.

[iv] The American Civil War was in a way a right v. left brain conflict. The North was pushing for a unified, one nation government with a strong executive. The South was fighting for state rights and the differentiation of strong states over a weak central government and a weaker executive. The technology and violence of the left won. We became one nation and not a collection of states. We began to say the United States is rather than the United States are.

Don’t misconstrue the previous comment to say that the South was solely right brained and good while the North was left brained and bad. Please avoid these huge generalities. This is a far more nuanced conversation considering tendencies. It could be said the problem with the South was that they took some very right brained ideas and solidified them into a left brain dogma. Had they kept their right brain open minded they might have been able to find a compromise rather than going to war. They might have also been able to see that their slaves were also part of themselves.

[v] There is an interesting difference between right brain creativity and left brain invention. While they rely on each other, they are different processes driven by the opposite sides of the brain; in one you create/design/make/generate and in the other you engineer/calculate/manufacture.

[vi] There are many great books on this. While I had understood the idea earlier, it was Leonard Schlain’s book, ART AND PHYSICS: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, that really finally made this make sense. After years of studying and reading about Modern Art and Modern Physics, his book helped me truly understand the two fields and their parallel relationship.

[vii] I was recently reading an article about how the inclusion of film/video from the Vietnam War on the Nightly News impacted the attitudes about the war. It made it real for people. This impact of technology occurred during the Civil War when Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam were first published in newspapers. Another example is the impact of Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcast during the Blitz at the start of the Second World War. However, the “shock and awe” of the Iraq war and video of drone strikes has seemed to distance us from the violence of war. Is it our oversaturation of fake image from television, film and video games or is it that our left brain processing of images has made us less empathetic?

The Teeter Totter of our Brains, Post 5

The Teeter Totter of our Brains

How Left v. Right Brain Dominance has Created our World

Post 5

[This is the fifth part of the series.  To begin at the beginning, please go to the Introduction.]

3: The Renaissance and the coming Modern

The left brain once again surged to match the right brain. This new moment of balance between the hemispheres gave us the Renaissance in Italy in the 15^th and 16th century. It quickly spread through Europe almost as quickly as the Black Plague. In England this explosive era of thought and invention coincided with the reign of their first female monarch: the Elizabethan Age.

The Renaissance was such a huge watershed in human development that it is a story that is known and does not need me to recount. What is essential from the point of view of this story is that the left brain came up to match the right brain bringing the two into balance again. The dynamism of the matched hemispheres caused an explosion in thought, invention and discovery. It was another Golden Age.

As important as this age was, what most interests me is what it spawned. The left brain continued to develop past and surpass the right brain. It became the master again. It gave birth to a new relationship with time, space, causality and identity.

Time became linear. It moved from an all at one time right brain medieval view of time to the left brained one at a time linear time. We started to appreciate the past and acknowledge the future. I know this is hard to wrap a brain around this idea, but the paintings and writings of the medieval era have a different relationship to time than now. You see Joseph and Mary: traveling to Bethlehem, giving birth to Jesus in the manger, being adored by the Magi and traveling to Egypt on the same canvas. As the left brain rose, its view of time took hold. Time became more linear and the clock became the guide.

Did the change in brain dominance allow for the Age of Exploration or did the Age of Exploration change our brains to experience space differently? The same question can be asked about rise of perspective in painting and architecture. We began to see and experience proportion, distance and differently. We started to move through space and distance. The compass, map, sextant and clock helped to understand that we were at a single point in space. Our very relationship with space changed.

The rise of the left brain coincides with the rise of identity. A person begins to realize that he/she is an individual separate from others. The right brain helps us to experience our interconnectedness to others. We feel part of the flock or hive. We see ourselves as part of the whole. The left brain helps us to differentiate ourselves from others. Our individuality becomes more important than our relationship with others.

People realized that they had choice. They (rather than God, their fate or destiny) controlled their lives. I often wonder which comes first: choice or individuality. Does the idea that I have choice make me specific and unique or does the fact that I’m unique allow me to have choices different than others? With choice comes causality. If I do this, then this will happen. I am responsible for my choices so I’d better make the right one.[i][ii]

Causality led to the development of the Scientific Method, the greatest idea of the Modern era. The left brain created the scientific method. The abstract thinking, the specific observation, the inductive reasoning are all very left brain attributes. Newton and Classical Physics are all products of the rising left brain. All of Newton’s laws are based on causality. Though his inspiration, whether it was the real or metaphysical apple falling on his head, came from the relational view of the right brain. One of the benefits of the scientific method is that it incorporates the inspiration and the holistic view of the right brain with the specific and detailed scrutiny of the left brain. Causality leads to the University, where every department is founded on understanding what will happen next. The natural sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities all try to figure out what will happen next.

Left brain continued to rise and surpassed the right brain. The movement that culminated in the Modern era began about four hundred years ago as the left brain ascended.[iii] The ascending left brain had a negative backlash. In the Jacobean period, the left brain grew to surpass the right. This caused a religious uprising and before you know it Cromwell takes over the country, Charles I lost his head, all of the theatres are torn down and the religious right comes to the forefront. In a few decades, a balance is restored. We get the restoration of the King, but everyone makes sure that it is done in moderation. Nothing too drastic. It’s OK for the King and Court to be philandering around as long as the common people behave and the country is really run by the Parliament.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s the right brain tried to get a new footing. It works with the left brain to inspire the Enlightenment. This gives rise to the American Revolution, then the French Revolution. This surge forward is followed by what should be called the First World War, the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the War of 1812 in America and many more related conflicts. Everyone settles down for a while. The left brain continues to surge. In pockets of nature, there is a lovely mid-19^th century movement called Romanticism that encourages right brained thinking. Byron, Shelley, Keats, even Thoreau and Emerson expand our right thinking brain.

The Naturalistic Painters go out and look at nature and paint what they see. At the same time, you have the pre-Raphaelites who signal that something is really about to change.

 [The Modern Era to the Next will arrive in a few days.]

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[i] Please read my posts on the To be or not to be Speech for more on this topic.

[ii] As I work on this, I often write huge sections that end up being tangents to the main argument. Here is another tangent:

As fiefdoms gathered into countries and kings of provinces became ruled by Kings of nations, things changed. These Kings came to believe that they given all of this power by God and therefore they were infallible. The Church also became very corrupt, more in it for the power, land and money than for the salvation of souls. The Kings started to feel they might be over the Pope. Many Kings were excommunicated or threatened with excommunication during this period. The Popes’ wild card of banning you and your followers from Heaven was very potent. Eventually, these Kings made a deal with the Pope and reentered God’s (or the Pope’s) grace.

Then along comes Henry the Eighth. He was way too big for his pumpkin pants. When the Pope said he couldn’t dump his Spanish Queen (The Pope couldn’t side with England over Spain at this juncture.), Henry dumped the church. He created the Church of England and made himself the head of it. Therefore, he could divorce, execute and bonk whoever he wanted. He seized the lands of the church and made everyone toss out the good Catholic Church which for generations had been the right way for his new improved church with the King at the top. People had a choice to either stay with what they had believed in their whole lives and be beheaded or choose the new church and live. Here’s is a problem. What to do? Most people did what most people do, the most expedient thing they can do to stay alive. A few died for their faith, so there. A few years later when Mary, Queen of Scots, got the throne for a brief moment, everyone went Catholic again. Queen Elizabeth brought back the Church of England. I went to the Salisbury Cathedral and saw a crypt for Bishop at that time. He had switched back and forth a few times while remaining Bishop of Salisbury. “I’m Catholic. I’m Anglican. I’m Catholic. I’m Anglican.”

If the King could make a choice like abandoning the church and he is asking me to choose between the Catholic Church and the Church of England, I must have the freedom of choice.

[iii] I don’t want to harp on this, but monotheism is the left brains friend. Believing in one God makes you right. When the right brain offers choices, religion sticks to its guns. It leads the devoted back to reading the Torah, Koran or Bible. The act of reading strengthens the left brain. It also makes it more absolute. This creates more dogma. You know that you’re right. You shut down questioning, exploration and also people who are others and you burn some witches. (The resurgence of a monotheistic dominant religion includes an increase in the patriarchy and a backlash against women.)

The Teeter Totter of Our Brains, Post 4

The Teeter Totter of our Brains

How Left v. Right Brain Dominance has Created our World

Post 4

[This is the fourth part of a series.  To begin at beginning, please go to the Introduction.]

1: The Classical Era

The left brain ascended and we got the Classical Era exemplified by the Golden Age of Greece. It was driven by reading and writing a symbolic alphabet. The left brain digs symbols and language, what could be better than putting them together? Literacy and education rose. A citizen (men who owned property) was expected to be literate and schooled. This is the first time literacy expanded past the few priests and scribes.

Writing drove the left brain upward. When most people write they use their right hand. The right hand is connected to the left side of the brain. Writing was a single handed activity until the invention of the typewriter. It created a direct link to the left brain.

As the left brain ascended it came into balance with the right brain. This presented an explosion of new ideas and the minds to develop these ideas. Ancient Greece gave birth to mathematics, logic, the natural sciences, philosophy, drama, and democracy. When the two sides of the brain are balanced it creates an explosion of new thought.

Though relatively balanced, the two sides of the brain swapped the lead for a few centuries. Sophocles was more right, Plato was very left, Aristotle was a swinger. He taught Alexander the Great who shared this great learning and the written language through conquests across the known world. All in all, the two sides maintained a balance from the 5^th century B.C. until well into the Roman Empire. With the rise of the Empire, the left brain rose to surpass the right brain for the first time.

[This is a good time to remind you, that I’m talking in wide generalities. The partnership and rivalry between the hemispheres was always in play, from year to year, region to region and person to person.]

The Romans were the first left brain dominant society. They made things work. They didn’t create much on their own, except during the Republic era when the two hemispheres sat at a balance. (The conflict between the two sides is the undercurrent argument in both of Shakespeare’s plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra). Once Caesar Augustus won, became the Emperor and engineered the Roman Empire, the left brain was off and running. [i]

The left brain was very good at running an empire. It excelled for centuries. The Roman Empire was a great bureaucracy. It was a developed system. It was not so much a time of great invention as it was a time of incorporating and perfecting the inventions of others. They made everything the Greeks and Roman Republic had come up with more efficient and workable. This was the strength of the Romans and it is the strength of the left brain. The entire empire settled into a steady progress. Even when the leader at the top was a total nutcase, the institution kept going.

The Right Brain maintained a strong support which kept the Empire near a balance. One contribution of the right brain was in the way the Romans incorporated the peoples and the cultures they conquered. They assimilated them. The conquered people for the most part could keep their own beliefs, practices and even their own leaders. They only had to accept a few ideas and systems from the Romans, along with paying taxes, not revolting and giving up their sovereignty. The Romans would run things and they were very good at running things. This worked for most peoples. [ii]

One way the Romans assimilated other cultures was in the gods question: “Do you have your own gods? Sure, they can be in the Pantheon. We probably already believe in your gods, we just call them by other names.” This polytheistic view worked for most people. Where the Romans ran into trouble was with the monotheists. Once you believe in only one God, then your God is better than everyone else’s gods. You’re right and everyone else is wrong. It’s very left brained. You can’t buy into a right brained Roman many-god solution if you only have one God. This is why the Romans had a particular problem with first the Jews and then the Christians. [iii] [iv] [v]

Even for the developing left brained Romans, the zealotry of the Christians was a reason to toss them to the lions.

After the first thriving years of the Empire where invention was matched with engineering something happened. The autocracy and bureaucracy of the Empire overtook the right brain. The emphases shifted away from the natural and invention to concepts, systems and rules. Art, poetry and life became abstracted. Remember the left brain is more comfortable with abstraction and symbol than the real and natural. One place this took over was in the rise of Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church. Over the first four centuries after Jesus Christ, his teachings became more rigid and dogmatic. Whether this was the normal course of any belief system or a result of the left brain dominant culture of the Roman Empire is hard to say. The dominant left brain found an ally in the Christian movement. In turn, Christian belief became more rigid, the priests/nuns became celibate, Jesus became the symbolic ‘son of God’ rather than the ‘son of man’, and the virgin birth was conceived. Beliefs were crafted by severe left brain thinking and all that was natural was removed.[vi]

By the early fourth century, Constantine embraced Christianity calling for religious tolerance. By the end of the century, paganism was outlawed. The eastern half of the Empire split from the western half. It had always been more right brained Greek than the west. The Church split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The east remained as the Byzantine Empire while the western part of the empire declined and was overrun by barbarians.

The true decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a topic for many volumes of books. The deterioration of the institutions of the empire was both a cause and a result of this decline. The legal system became corrupt. Romans passed on the duty of being soldiers to foreigners and mercenaries. There was a decline in literacy and education. The industriousness that created the empire was exchanged for indulgence in the excesses of privileges offered by wealth. The ruling class became indifferent to ruling. Still, the system was so good the decline of the Empire took centuries.

2: The Dark and Medieval Ages

After a while the left hemisphere declined. It seems the left brain tried to stand alone without the right brain or with the right brain in servitude to the left. The left side of the brain deteriorated rapidly leaving a weakened right brain. For the decline of the Roman Empire was a decline in the left hemisphere’s dominance. I believe that the right hemisphere did not rise to surpass the left, but the left declined. This is an important distinction that will matter later.

The left brain diminished and the right brain had to take back the reins. In the west, the decline disintegrated into the “dark ages.”

Scholars of the Early Middle Ages (c. 5^th – 10^th Century A.D.) tend to dislike the term “Dark Ages” as it diminishes the times. This period was not as dark as often ascribed. However, from the point of view of this argument, this period showed a decline in brain function and progress. I’m trying to avoid a left brain centric view that would throw out the entire human experience from the decline of Rome to the beginning of the Renaissance; however this part was pretty bleak.

It needs to be said, that while Europe plunged into the Dark Ages, the Muslims, Jews and the Moors progressed. They maintained a strong left brain culture based in most part on their religion’s emphasis on the word and literacy. This helped them keep the two sides of the brain in greater balance with the left brain slightly leading. [vii]

The Catholic Church did not stress the importance of reading. Most of the local clergy leading small congregations were illiterate. The Church understood that to maintain power it helps to control the information and the interpretation of that information. Also, most kings and leaders remained illiterate. Charlemagne the Great was unable to read and write all but his name.

At the core of the church a left brain order remained to manage the system, but it was not widespread. Life returned to a more primitive existence. This is not just a description of the practicalities of life, but also the point of view. It seems that for a few centuries, we were out of both sides of our minds.

By the middle of the Middle Ages (1000 – 1300 A.D.), the right side of the brain began to engage. St. Francis of Assisi helped to reconnect the church to nature and life of necessity. Society developed. There was a significant difference between the lives of the commoner and elite whether that elite was royalty or clergy. There was little to no functional middle class. There was a difference between the laborer and skilled labor. Progress came from learning and excelling at a trade. For the commoner, the world was simple. People didn’t travel. There was a loss of the system of time. This world was as it was and as it always will be.

The world was fixed. A person understood his place in the world; his function. This was his identity often even his name. There was no mobility in status, rank or distance. There was no time, because there was no change. In the absence of clocks and even calendars, only the holy days marked by the church provided a sense of time changing. Time was marked by the eras of the Popes and the Kings.

It is important to understand how the right brain made this time because the space-less, timeless, identity-less experience was generated by the right brain in the absence of a strong left brain. It was a different experience than a left brain-centric world.

The primary building of the Medieval Era was the Cathedral. They were created over a few centuries by unnamed craftsmen. A sculptor or plasterer could spend his whole life working in the cathedral. It was started before he was born and would not be finished until long after his death. He was part of the continuum of the cathedral. As a cog in the wheel he was nameless and without identity. He was part for the mechanism of the cathedral which was a microcosm of the cathedral of the universe.

The Cathedral was the centerpiece of a community. Through its design and artwork it told the stories of the bible and of their place in the system. It was a place of awe, a spectacle. It was where people were instructed how to live in their time. They experienced their part in the grand scheme of God’s universe.

The Cathedral was the center of religious, civic and cultural life. However, some forms of entertainment were not permitted. By 1000 A.D., the actors got themselves kicked out of the church for asking questions and making fun of the clergy. The theatrical entertainment climaxed with Passion Plays that moved through the town being performed in wagons supported by the various craftsmen guilds. This is a good example of a right brain way of thinking about the telling of a story. Not one point of view or one location, but multiple views, multiple locations and not always told in linear order.

There is no surprise that the Medieval Era gave rise to the “cult of the” Virgin and Courtly Love. The right brain respects and honors the matriarchy. As the right brain flourished, there was a rise in the worship of the Virgin Mary, the Christian Mother Goddess. At its best the balance of the right brain with the left brain in Catholicism honors not only the Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit but also includes the Virgin Mother. The inclusion of the feminine with the masculine patriarchy is essential for balance and is a sign of balance between the hemispheres of the brain.

The Middle and Late Medieval Ages featured the Crusades. For the first time in centuries, peasants, knights and royals who had never traveled outside of their hamlet were travelling across the continent to another part of the world. As they traveled, they were exposed to ideas, experiences and sensations both ancient and new. Travel develops the brain. They brought back different thoughts and tastes than when they left. They returned home as different people than when they left.

The Crusades, the writing of regional languages, and the rise in literacy all combined to increase the left brain. The writings and ideas of the ancients were re-introduced. When they started reading Aristotle, Pythagoras and Archimedes, a whole new vista opened up for them. In the latter half of the 15^th century Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press making written material exponentially more available than prior to this invention. This invention revolutionized the world. The resulting increase in literacy and regional languages led to a sharp rise in the left brain.

When the left brain rises in power, it honors specificity, logic, language over image, reason over emotion. It also inspires are patriarchal leaning, an overwhelming focus on correctness and backlash against the other and the feminine.

As the left brain rose to match the right, we achieved balance once again. The fruit of that balance was called the Renaissance.

[More coming on Tuesday, Oct. 9] 

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[i] That’s a topic that could keep me writing for days: How the Right Brained Roman Republic led/ gave way/lost to the Left Brained Roman Empire. Another time.

[ii] When the Romans took over a city, they were quick to build three specific buildings: The Amphitheatre (or Hippodrome) for the horse/chariot races and wagering; the Coliseum for the blood sports, and the Theaters for cultural instruction and comedy. These three different venues for entertainment were important because they helped distract and civilize the citizens. The races or athletic competitions fed the desire for competition. Throughout the Empire, there were four teams designated by color to root for. No matter where you were in the Empire you could root for the Greens. Think of this as the sports entertainment that fills our TVs today. The Blood Sports of the Gladiators offered the cathartic experience. This allowed for the release of the basest and most violent instincts. This pacified and distracted the mob. We currently get this from our movies and football. The Theater was built for both tragic and comic plays. This entertainment taught the new populace what it was to be living in their time as members of the Empire. It was also the place that allowed a place to make fun of and ridicule the leaders.

[iii] I want to argue that Polytheism is right brained and Monotheism is left brained. Though I’m not sure it is true. The right brain seeing the big picture and open to all possibilities can get behind the idea that there are many gods. Hell, the idea that everything is god and we are all part of god sits well with the right brain. The feminine right brain is also comfortable with an Earth Mother rather than a male Sky God. The left brain can get very comfortable with the singular focus on one God. It also grooves on the abstractness and ineffability of one God. Most one God believers describe their God as male which fits for the masculine left brain. Also the emphasis that Judaism, Christianity and Islam place on the written word and their rejection of image is very left brain.

Remember the right side of the brain loves new ideas and loves to communicate with stories and images. The left brain loves to take an idea, lock it in, write it down and make it into a rule. I believe Jesus started with a right brained-centric idea, then as Christianity developed, it got written down and cemented. The idea shifted to the patriarchal and the dogmatic. Read the Gospel of Thomas for an interesting contrast to the Epistles by Paul.

[iv] The current riots in the Middle East are in part due to a video portraying the prophet Mohammad. This is a big no no in Islam, even if the portrayal is deifying and not ridiculing. It’s all blasphemy. It’s also very left brain-centric: words, not images. If Muslims allowed images and portrayals of the Prophet, it would engage their right brains and open them up to a more empirical view of the Mohammad, the interpretation of his teachings, their leader and the rest of the world. Perhaps, the introduction of the technology that brings an overwhelming onslaught sounds, images, and interconnectedness is changing the brains of young Muslims faster than the Imams can teach left brained ideology form the Koran. On the other or same side, an ultra-orthodox Jewish rabbi has called for all of his follower to destroy their IPhones: http://www.timesofisrael.com/burn-your-iphones-leading-rabbi-rules/]

[v] I clearly need to write the paper on Religion and Brain Lateralization. It’s a huge topic.

[vi] Leonard Schlain in book, THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS, argues that this is the path of all religions. The teacher/prophet/leader speaks an open, inclusive idea that is very right brained. In time either he or his followers writes it down and it increasingly becomes more fixed and dogmatic. One example of this is the Koran: early Mohammad sounds rather free love compared with militaristic and dogmatic older Mohammad.

[vii] There is an interesting idea to pursue about the balance of the patriarchal external world and the matriarchal internal home life that thrives in Jewish and most Mediterranean cultures. It is an interesting balance.

The Teeter Totter of our Brains, Post 3

The Teeter Totter of our Brains

How Left v. Right Brain Dominance has Created our World

Post 3

[This is part of a series. Introduction or 2nd Section]

0: The Primitive Era

In the beginning . . ., maybe not that far back. Let’s look at the time between when we developed language until the creation of the alphabet. We can call this the Primitive Era. Our right brains were dominant. We were learning, figuring things out. Our perception of our world was more global. I refer to this as the zero era, the starting point.

We became the humans we recognize as being human between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago.  This is when we developed into Cro-Magnons.  During this time, we must have evolved from speaking a proto-language on sounds and rudimentary words to a full blown language with a vocabulary, syntax and grammar.  By 40,000 year ago, a spoken language was intact and gave us an explosion of innovation including sharp stone tools, needles, fishhooks, bows and arrows and rope. This is called the Great Leap Forward.  It must have been caused or at least fully aided by the development and implementation of language. 

While we were still firmly in our right brains, the left brain came into its own with the development of language.  This was the start of the rise of the left brain. 

In the Judeo-Christian Creation Myth, God gave Man dominion over the animals and gave him the task to name the animals. The gift of language and the ability to name was what made man superior to the other animals. The rise of the language left brain working with the learning right brain gave us the first major leap ahead. Language took us to the next level. Language gave us our first glimpse of our own identity. We gained an appreciation of how we were separate from each other, the animals and the forces that impacted us.

We began worshiping the forces larger than us. At first, it was the earth Mother, Gaia. We acknowledged the sun, moon, stars, wind and rain. But all cultures began with earth worship and that deity was female. It contained all other forces; everything including ourselves was part of the earth. It was during the great leap forward that we started to make art: cave paintings and sculptures.  Much of our first art work was to a female deity. 

Even after other cultures moved forward, (We could say evolved if we can accept the use of the word to describe minute, though monumental, changes that occur all of the time and not just over tens of thousands of years. To go from a reptile to a bird takes a long time, but don’t dismiss the rapid minute changes that are happening all of the time.) some cultures remained primitive into the twentieth century. By now, I don’t believe that there are any primitives left.

Anthropologist who studied the more recent primitives, the indigenous people such as the Aborigine in Australia, the natives in New Guinea, or even some native American tribes, have noted an experience of all time being one time. Space being transportable and not solid. These are concepts that will be revisited by the quantum physicist of our time. And what drove this, is the primitives were living more in their right brain than in their left brain. The experience of the world for the right brain is one where time is circular and not linear. It also tells us that space can be crossed instantaneously.

Agriculture was our next great invention.  It started about 10,000 years ago in several parts of the world disconnected to each other.  For man to figure out agriculture it takes a huge relationship between the left and right brain. The right brain has to notice the seasons, the how things change over time and hold the past/present/future in the same moment. The left brain has to engage in specific focus and do what it does best: if, then. The development of the concept of if I do this, then this will happen is the root of consciousness. While lower level mammals exhibit instinct that resembles this concept, it is what makes the upper level primates a cut above.

The Orangutan swinging high above the jungle floor, sometimes one hundred feet in the air, pauses to wonder: if I swing over to that tree will it hold my four hundred pound weight? This is the beginning of consciousness. To be wrong would mean a painful fall to jungle floor, not to mention the embarrassment. This moment of consideration is vital.

The primitive man looking over at the junk pile and saying: “Hey, fruit is growing over there where we tossed out the seeds last year. If we planted the seeds, then fruit would grow there and we would no longer have to be hunters and gatherers. We could be farmers. What if we can get those animals to stick around? No more wandering. No more tents. Homes with soft beds and warm roofs. Plenty of food. Leisure time. Sports. Monday night football on a big screen TV. Beer. And on.”

The rise of the left brain gave us agriculture and animal husbandry, it worked with the right to make it work.

However, Agriculture took a while to catch on.  Some societies never adopted it even though they knew of it from others.  Conventional wisdom would dictate that it made life easier, gave us leisure time, and made us healthier.  Once we have agriculture, our groups can grow larger than a nomadic party. It gave rise to cities, specialized labor, leisure time, class structure, and time to ponder. It also brought us larger towns with more people, the ruling and clergy classes, traffic and the accumulation of stuff.  It brought us diseases.  If moving out of the cave was a bad idea, then leaving the nomadic life of the hunter and gatherer could be considered another big mistake.  I wonder if this is why some cultures didn’t adopt agriculture.  Was it better to stay back in the primitive?

On the other hand, the leisure time and division of labor derived from agriculture gave rise to a learned class which in time gave us written language. The first written languages used pictographs rather than symbols, drawings that represented words rather than symbols put together to make words. This is because a written language had to be developed first in the right brain and it does images better than symbols. After the brains began to perfect written language, the left brain shifted it to a symbolic alphabet. This was more efficient and included so many more options. It also gave rise to quick growth of the left brain.

The Egyptians were the pinnacle civilization that still retained a right brain edge. Their written language made of pictographs, their religious system, even their construction showed a leading right brain with a strong left brain support.

The worship of the Earth Mother gave way to a pantheon of gods, male and female, though increasingly male dominant. This demonstrates a brain development for categorization and assigning of specific tasks to specific gods. The gods also became more human like. There is an interesting transition from the Egyptian pantheon to the Greek and then the Roman.  The gods became more human, more flawed, and less omnipotent. They are a right brain dominant that is starting to have too much left brain involved.

When Moses said let my people go, he was leading his people to a different promised land than Israel. He gave them a monotheistic religion, with an alphabet and a respect for the word over the image. The Jewish faith/culture emphasized literacy. More than anything, literacy develops the left brain. This, if anything, can be pointed to as the ascension of the left brain over the right.

It’s important to give nod to the Phoenicians. This Semitic Canaanite people founded a major civilization between 1200 – 500 B.C in what is now known as Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. They created one of the first alphabets. They were a maritime society that traveled all over the Mediterranean. Their alphabet inspired the development of the Greek alphabet. The Greeks added vowels that were lacking from the Phoenician alphabet. (It remains in question whether the Phoenician alphabet inspired the Hebrew alphabet or the other way around.)

Along with the contiguous advances of the Phoenicians and Greeks, this ascension of the left brain gave birth to a golden age, the Classical Era. Let’s call this the Era One.

[Next section coming on Monday, Oct. 8]