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The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
Audiobook24 hours

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

Written by Leonard Shlain

Narrated by Norman Dietz

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Who changed the sex of God?

This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 26, 2017
ISBN9781541484962
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
Author

Leonard Shlain

Leonard Shlain was a bestselling author, inventor and surgeon. Admired among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists and educators, Shlain authored three bestselling books: Art & Physics, Alphabet vs. The Goddess and Sex, Time, and Power. He delivered stunning visual presentations based upon his books in venues around the world including Harvard, The New York Museum of Modern Art, CERN, Los Alamos, The Florence Academy of Art and the European Council of Ministers. His fans include Al Gore, Norman Lear and singer Bjork. Shlain died in May 2009 at the age of 71 from brain cancer shortly after the completion of this book. His legacy continues with his children who helped bring this book to publication: Kimberly Brooks, artist and founding editor of the Arts and Science Section of the Huffington Post, Jordan Shlain, doctor and founder of Healthloop.com and Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and director of the Sundance documentary, Connected, about the ideas in Leonardo’s Brain, as well as Leonard Shlain’s final year. Visit www.leonardshlain.com.

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Reviews for The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Rating: 3.958823529411765 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What an excellent story! Shlain keeps you engaged with his prose and image making. The continued connections he made with history and the workings of the mind were staggering and thought provoking. Sometimes he pushes hard to keep his narrative argument going but allowing his collusions stimulates a whole new understanding of human cognition and experience.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Yuck, idk how to get past all the men are from Mars, women are from Venus pseudoscience or exaggeration or whatever it is to get to his actual point. I got to chapter 4, already there are a number of assertions that are just too extreme, which make me doubt the author’s qualifications to make his argument.
    It’s an intriguing idea, but based on what he’s said so far, there’s no way he’s going to put together a compelling argument. I mean, come on, women absolutely don’t hunt, in any society, sigh. All women always hold there baby on one side and that’s because only half their brain works. All men only use the other side of their brain. Seriously? Men and women have complex brains and use both freaking sides. How is that in dispute? And men and women are raised in many different cultures that emphasize many different ways of being, living, doing, raising children, hunting, etc. Apparently the author is a neurosurgeon, he clearly isn’t an anthropologist
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    How sad the author is no longer alive and how brilliant his book is! I would buy thousand of them and give out to people to read. The prologue is a true cherry to even out any wrinkles one might have noticed. ??
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is like a history book of world religions. Totally fascinating i plan on listing to it again.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am all over the map in rating this book. In the end, I am unconvinced, and I think it has a lot of errors and inconsistencies, but it asks interesting questions that are worth examining whether or not the author's thesis is correct. There are parts that deserve five stars and parts that deserve one. I started it with great hope - avid reader though I am, I love books that carefully explore unusual ideas, like the downside of literacy. In the beginning, Shlain seemed so precise and careful that I expected this to be well-thought out. It fell apart fast - I almost quit reading halfway through. I did love his ending argument that visual media are restoring a balance, although that is mostly my impatience with people who regard every change as the end of the world. My greatest problem is the inconsistency between societies that according to Shlain's thesis should be similar. The Romans and the Jews, for instance: both encouraged universal male literacy using an alphabet. If the alphabet caused the Jews to be monotheistic, shun images and denigrate women, how is it that it that the Romans, as Shlain describes them, were polytheistic, religiously tolerate (for the most part), avid consumers of visual arts, and gave women an unusually high-standing in society? Similarly, the Egyptians and the Chinese both used graphs instead of letters, which Shlain regards as more benign. Yet he claims that Egyptian woman had a very high status and lots of rights whereas Chinese women were oppressed. Granted that things besides literacy affect society, but these are the very points that it is supposed to affect most strongly. There are also other things that seem illogical. Shlain's thesis is that Archaic or Neolithic agricultural societies were nurturing and at least gender-equal if not matriarchal. Then how is it that Egyptian women, in a literate society, are described as having the highest status in the area? How is it that the Jews, with an alphabet and a high literacy rate (the only thing worse is a printing press), are supposed to have invented morality, compassion and social welfare? Wouldn't these things more logically belong to the illiterate Nurturing Neolithics? And how would we compare these societies? There is evidence from Neolothic burials that they did take care of people unable to fend for themselves. I also question some of the facts. So in China, they tended to form stable empires and weren't warlike? The Chinese Empire just "formed" did it, no violence involved? Why are the generally illiterate nomads thought of as so warlike? Shlain says that Henry VIII took up with Anne Boleyn when she was 17 and beheaded her when she was 19. Since Anne's date of birth and the early history of her involvement are uncertain, I wouldn't argue with Shlain about her being 17, although now she is usually thought to have been in her mid-twenties. However, between the beginning of the annulment process and her death was closer to nine years, he obviously has his facts wrong. A minor point, but there are enough similar examples to make me wonder. I also suspect that the right brain/female and left brain/male dichotomy has been overdone. Since women have no trouble learning to read, one has to wonder how it is the literacy was a male province. Still there is a lot to think about in this book, and approached in the right spirit, it's always good to look at things from a new angle and reconsider conventional wisdom.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the weaving of the history of the written language with the treatment of women. Great storytelling.On the other hand, his theory that use of writing caused maltreatment of women is a weak theory. He writes about his theory as if it were true. From the evidence he gives, it seems to me that the opposite is true; that written language was, and still is, a tool used by a patriarchal culture to control the lower classes, including women. The evidence shows how there is an ongoing war against women's freedom.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    You'll never view the written word in the same way again. It was hard for a lover of the written word to read, but his theories ring true for me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author presents some very interesting ideas, but ultimately I was not convinced. I don't know everything he referenced, but I do know that he got a lot of things wrong. For example, "Leviticus is that section of the Old Testament that enumerates 613 laws . . . ." Still, it was fun to share selected quotes and argue them for a session about how the existence of the Semitic alphabet changed the world. He says that Judaism is text-based / left-brained / structured / specific / logical / masculine instead of image-based / right-brained / spiritual / global / intuitive / feminine. But I maintain that Jewish rituals and stories have always been as much a part of the religion / culture as the non-illustrated text. At some point I started skipping chapters.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Though I found Shlain’s theory compelling and provocative, I ultimately wasn’t able to sit still with the idea that something as simple as the mechanics of how we communicate could exert such profound influence on our attitudes toward complex, all-encompassing topics such as gender and spirituality, not to mention all the other areas which Shlain implicated as effects of our linguistic tools, such as our regard of the natural world and of our bodies, etc. Furthermore, I found his attribution of language to the left hemisphere and images to the right hemisphere to be too clean cut to adequately describe real-world uses of words and images. For bureaucratic and scientific purposes, language depends on a linear procession of discrete modules to convey an explicit, literal meaning, left-brain style. But for the expression of anything besides pure, cold information – and this type of situation is what arises most frequently in day-to-day social intercourse – language users, even those using the written form, often depend on right-brain faculties such as affect, associative meaning, imagery, irony, humor and other non-literal devices. And though the holistic apprehension of images and other visual input is typically the remit of the right hemisphere, images themselves can very easily work for a left-brain agenda by reflecting its fragmented, disembodied vision of the world – as a brief foray into modern and postmodern art will readily attest to. These objections aside, there remains the far more obviously simplistic notion that the brain hemispheres are somehow aligned to genders, a theoretical assertion that real life experience easily trumps. For example, I consider myself a very left-brained person, with all that that implies – I am rarely grounded in my bodily sensations and physical surroundings, I think in more abstract than concrete terms, etc. – but I by no means disdain females, nor do I regret the fact that I am myself a female.The intention with which we set out to communicate surely must have more impact on how we choose to employ our tools, rather than our tools dictating our uses, and not only that, but regimenting our mindsets so definitively that our thought cannot venture outside of the limitations of the tools themselves. Thus, according to Shlain’s explanation, the technical details of language – how it depends on abstract representation, and is ordered in a linear fashion, etc. – will consequently limit our thought to abstractions and linearity, too. Such a model of human behavior is evocative of a machine which can act only upon the software with which it has been coded, or of a circuit board whose output depends on a linear chain of cause and effect… Perhaps this mechanistic concept is how our collective left brain has primed us to think of the world and ourselves. It seems to me, then, that Shlain has himself recurred to a left-brain mode of thought in the very act of trying to warn us of its pernicious effects. I prefer to think that cause and effect don’t work nearly as linearly as left-brain conceptualization would have us believe – instead, our preferential use of one or another expressive outlet, our perceptions of gender differences, our disdain or esteem of the bodily and the concrete, our tendency to think linearly and analytically or holistically and intuitively, etc., are interrelated in a network of associations, and all collaborate to reinforce one another. As to what makes these characteristics a cohesive whole, I’d venture a guess that they spring from a fundamental attitude towards the world that each of the brain hemispheres has. And if it’s odd to think of the brain hemispheres as having separate attitudes towards the world, as if they were two different people taking up residence inside our heads, it is certainly no odder than thinking that a computing machine is encased in our skulls, and that all it takes to ‘re-wire’ our way of thinking is to change the code a bit, say, to process images instead of words. The mind forms such a large part, if not all, of human behavior, that to think of it as less than human, as a mechanism, as so many current metaphors of the brain unfortunately would have us do, is to unnecessarily limit our understanding of ourselves.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book takes a cardiovascular surgeon view point on neurophysiology of the brain psychology, and the use of brain function in culture and its predictable social response. This book takes theoretical approach similar to educated analysis in physical anthropology with how the human mind functions.This is an excellent book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A real challenge to the idea that human history has been a continuous march upward. Posits that the arrival of language and its linear sensibility served to diminish the role and value of women. Some factual errors, but overall a fascinating theory that you don't need to accept to appreciate. Paired with the new assessments of how agriculture impacted human health (see The Third Chimpanzee for a quick summary,) and you may have a whole new way of thinking about history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Mind bending
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I did not read this book by Shlain but I read his previous book, the one that got past the critics. The one about Art and Science. I took a class at Vista college in Berkeley by some guy who was convinced that Shlain is some kind of genius. As a treat at the end of the class Shlain came and did a book pitch for this gem.We had the opportunity to have him sign it after an astonishing lecture with slides about the "new theories" of human evolution that came out of Shlain.Shlain is a brain surgeon by trade and he has many various intellectual avocations which he has incorporated into his hodge-podge of tripe that has found regard for in certain circles of academia. He is the Philosopher in residence at UC Davis.One of his personal observations is that computers needed to be devised to assist the human species with a continuation of child birthing. He said at the lecture that babies heads have become so large due to the pressure of all the new scientific advancements and such that a person being born now has a greatly increased skull size. The womens pelvises are no longer large enough to pass these monstrously large skulls through in child birth, therefore we needed computers to take some of the knowledge out of our heads and keep the size of baby heads at a reasonable dimension. But what I found most offensive is the stuff about about the use of the alphabet and its effect on the health of the human mind in general. He suggests that language is a toxic material that will be eliminated over time as the superior female mind begins to overwhelm the world through the creation of a new pictograph language being brought about by the computer age. This is being embraced by new age feminist pagans as a cool idea. It is incredibly anti-intellectual. It is fascistic in its core. It is a notion of eliminating all history and reason to be reinterpreted by these new esoteric beings, the new god women. He is just a cuddly fruitcake.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Shlain presents an exhaustive (and exhausting) tramp through written history to support his thesis that changes in the dominant form of communication upset the balance between brain hemispheres. Replication of this imbalance at a cultural level leads to violence, intolerance, and misogyny. Shlain batters the reader with post hoc evidence and bludgeons them so monotonously with his thesis that I found it difficult to accept even the points with which I agreed—this in spite of his own acknowledgment that correlation does not prove causality.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author's thesis that monotheism and literacy have contributed to societies that are intolerant, violent and denigrating toward women is definitely interesting. Whether the arguments are ultimately convincing or not, many fascinating points are made in the book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am all over the map in rating this book. In the end, I am unconvinced, and I think it has a lot of errors and inconsistencies, but it asks interesting questions that are worth examining whether or not the author's thesis is correct. There are parts that deserve five stars and parts that deserve one. I started it with great hope - avid reader though I am, I love books that carefully explore unusual ideas, like the downside of literacy. In the beginning, Shlain seemed so precise and careful that I expected this to be well-thought out. It fell apart fast - I almost quit reading halfway through. I did love his ending argument that visual media are restoring a balance, although that is mostly my impatience with people who regard every change as the end of the world. My greatest problem is the inconsistency between societies that according to Shlain's thesis should be similar. The Romans and the Jews, for instance: both encouraged universal male literacy using an alphabet. If the alphabet caused the Jews to be monotheistic, shun images and denigrate women, how is it that it that the Romans, as Shlain describes them, were polytheistic, religiously tolerate (for the most part), avid consumers of visual arts, and gave women an unusually high-standing in society? Similarly, the Egyptians and the Chinese both used graphs instead of letters, which Shlain regards as more benign. Yet he claims that Egyptian woman had a very high status and lots of rights whereas Chinese women were oppressed. Granted that things besides literacy affect society, but these are the very points that it is supposed to affect most strongly. There are also other things that seem illogical. Shlain's thesis is that Archaic or Neolithic agricultural societies were nurturing and at least gender-equal if not matriarchal. Then how is it that Egyptian women, in a literate society, are described as having the highest status in the area? How is it that the Jews, with an alphabet and a high literacy rate (the only thing worse is a printing press), are supposed to have invented morality, compassion and social welfare? Wouldn't these things more logically belong to the illiterate Nurturing Neolithics? And how would we compare these societies? There is evidence from Neolothic burials that they did take care of people unable to fend for themselves. I also question some of the facts. So in China, they tended to form stable empires and weren't warlike? The Chinese Empire just "formed" did it, no violence involved? Why are the generally illiterate nomads thought of as so warlike? Shlain says that Henry VIII took up with Anne Boleyn when she was 17 and beheaded her when she was 19. Since Anne's date of birth and the early history of her involvement are uncertain, I wouldn't argue with Shlain about her being 17, although now she is usually thought to have been in her mid-twenties. However, between the beginning of the annulment process and her death was closer to nine years, he obviously has his facts wrong. A minor point, but there are enough similar examples to make me wonder. I also suspect that the right brain/female and left brain/male dichotomy has been overdone. Since women have no trouble learning to read, one has to wonder how it is the literacy was a male province. Still there is a lot to think about in this book, and approached in the right spirit, it's always good to look at things from a new angle and reconsider conventional wisdom.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    very challenging read. I took notes before & during my reading, and in the end Shlain convinced me that written language and gender are deeply connected