The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (2 page)

2

The Left-handed Picador

In 1899 Pablo Picasso, at eighteen already a reasonably successful up-and-coming artist, tried his hand at copper-plate engraving for the first time. He created a standing portrait of a picador, the man at a bullfight who rides around on horseback and goads the bull with a lance. The result was a disappointment in every respect, but most of all because it seemed the lance had unintentionally been placed in the picador’s left hand. Of course Picasso had engraved an appropriately right-handed picador, but his inexperience was such that he hadn’t taken account of the fact that an etching is always a mirror image of the original. He cleverly made a virtue of necessity by inscribing in wild lettering above the final result
El Zurdo
, the left-handed man. His honour was spared, but it was another five years before Picasso ventured to make another copper-plate engraving.

Picasso’s sense of disappointment shows how deeply ingrained is the distinction between left and right; how attached we are to getting things the right way around; how eager we all are, unconventional artists included, to conform to the norm: right-handedness.

The importance of choosing the right side in the most literal sense was demonstrated by the threats aimed at the world community, over the heads of Congress, by us president George W. Bush on 20 September 2001, just a week after the attack of 11 September 2001 that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, with almost 3,000 deaths as a direct consequence. ‘Every nation,’ he said, ‘in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ On 6 November that same year, before preparations began for the invasion of Iraq – which he unleashed in March 2003 in alliance with what became known as the ‘coalition of the willing’ – Bush once again made clear just how simple a situation this was: ‘Over time it’s going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.’

Pablo Picasso, El Zurdo  , 1899.

Bush was the target of much justified criticism for his black-and-white vision of world politics. Anyone who kept a cool head for a moment and gave the matter some thought understood that there were all kinds of reasons why a country might decline to join Bush’s punishment expedition without necessarily harbouring any sympathy for the enemies of America, but the president, in his intellectual simplicity, provided a clear example of how people generally tend to think: in black and white. A whole arsenal of sayings underlines the point: the best of both worlds, it’s a two-way street, boom or bust, stand or fall, do or die. People are all too keen to make such distinctions as clear-cut and absolute as possible. Black-and-white clarity gives us more confidence, a greater feeling of having a grip on reality, than the grey tones of accuracy and nuance.

The
US
president was hardly the first leader to express himself in this way. For all his lack of charisma and rhetorical talent, Bush’s oversimplified statements placed him in a long, motley line of demagogues that goes back at least to Alcibiades of Athens in around 450 bc. He understood perfectly well, as did more recent historical figures such as French revolutionaries Danton and Marat, Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini, and indeed the entire gamut of present-day populist strongmen, that playing the crowd is all about polarization, the distilling of complicated issues into a simple antithesis. History is full of variations on the theme of ‘we’re in the right so they’re in the wrong’: we proletarians are honest, poor and oppressed, so every non-proletarian is an lackey of deceitful, filthy rich and oppressive capitalism; we Westerners love freedom, therefore the Communists tried to crush us. Similarly, most religions, especially the great monotheisms, keep their flocks united by telling them they’ve been chosen by the one true God and everyone else is doomed, or at least inferior. This is as true of Judaism as it is of Islam. Even Christianity, which has made a doctrine out of charity and mercy, has its Day of Judgment when the sheep and goats will be separated for all eternity.

Just how naturally polarization comes to us was illustrated by the witch-hunt against people alleged to have leftist sympathies in the United States of the 1950s. The episode is known as McCarthyism, but Senator Joseph McCarthy was in reality no more than a willing camp follower who managed to profit from a fear of Communism that had been growing steadily since the Second World War. Stalin’s Soviet Union had demonstrated its military might during that war and, mindful of the revolutionary Bolshevik rhetoric of the 1920s and ’30s, America was terrified of a Communist coup, even invasion. People started to see spies everywhere and in 1947 the us government initiated so-called loyalty reviews. Congress, not wanting to be left behind, set up its own commission to track down disloyal elements. Its most zealous member was a young, ambitious politician called Richard M. Nixon who many years later, as
US
president, would be brought down by his mistrust of others. It was called the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Note that Congress did not choose to talk of ‘anti-American’ or ‘pro-Communist’ activities. This is the most primitive and at the same time the ultimate form of black-and-white thinking: put ‘un-’ in front of your ideal and you know what it is you need to combat.

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 associated 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:

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 deeply 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’.