The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (7 page)
Looked at from this perspective, racism and discrimination have a biological basis, however annoying that conclusion may be to the cultural relativists among us. They can comfort themselves with the thought that everyone is equally endowed with uncanny valley sensitivities, and our instinctive unease when confronted with people who are different from us need not have any serious consequences. If we so choose, we can simply brush our discomfort aside. But if the aberration in question is characteristic of a recognizable minority, if the circumstances are unfavourable, with significant conflicts of interest, and if people are systematically incited to hostility against a particular minority, then the results can be truly appalling.
The less noticeably others depart from the norm, the less impact the uncanny valley effect will have. We can’t escape the strange smells coming from a new neighbour’s kitchen – we simply have to get used to them – but no one is going to notice that the man who’s just moved in next door is left-handed. This explains why left-handedness is generally regarded as only slightly negative, only a tiny bit suspicious. In folk tales the left is on average slightly more often connected with evil or with something frightening than the right, but it’s certainly not inescapably associated with unadulterated evil. The same applies in everyday life. Many people pay lip service to the idea that left-handers are clumsy, but they don’t really have anything against left-handed people. The subject of hand preference only faintly troubles them. Often they don’t even know which of their friends and acquaintances are left-handed.
There are really only three areas in which we see what looks like a powerful rejection of everything connected with the left side and the left hand, and all three are strictly cultural and formal aspects of social life: etiquette, literature and religion.
To begin with religion, churches have strict regulations governing the hand with which ritual acts are to be performed and how the participants are to position themselves. In religious mythology a bad odour usually attaches to anything to do with the left. The Catholic Church has been known to interpret a refusal as an infant to suck a mother’s left breast as evidence of piety in one of its saints. Catholic religious art is no less strictly rule-bound. A left-handed saint or apostle is inconceivable, let alone a left-handed member of the Holy Family. There are three reasons why these rules are so strict.
The first is the motif of inversion, which is used extensively by the Christian churches to accentuate the God–Devil antithesis. It makes the left literally devilish. Second, the great monotheistic religions refuse to have anything to do with magic and tend to distrust human passions, so they are hostile to the left side and the left hand. This is not to say that these religions are particularly geared to rationality – they aren’t – but human impulses, being so hard to control, offer an ideal means of keeping fellow believers in check. Forbid people to succumb to natural urges and the faithful are bound to fail. The celibacy of Catholic priests and the separation of the sexes advocated by Islam are the most extreme examples, but dietary laws, compulsory periods of fasting and an endless number of other behavioural rules, preferably as complicated and as inimical to relaxation, fun and enjoyment as possible, are part of the cherished arsenal of practically all religions. The sense of guilt that flows from the inevitable violation of these rules helps faiths to discipline their flocks and thereby to perpetuate themselves.
The third reason, the formality of church rituals and religious art, is more abstract. Rituals are unfathomable almost by definition. If they are not to become garbled or forgotten, they must be clearly recognizable and repeatable. Rituals have less to do with the actual acts involved than with the fact that those acts have to be performed in precisely the prescribed manner. Anyone who deviates from the course laid down automatically invalidates the ritual. It’s logical that in the world of rituals, contrasts have to be made as black-and-white as possible, and as a result the left side and the left hand are not just a tiny bit suspect but subject to strict prohibitions.
Icons and other religious depictions are also in some sense ritualistic in nature. They need to convey a clearly defined religious message that can be understood in the absence of any additional information. Clarity is paramount. A vast gulf therefore exists between the artist and the public; there’s little or no room for anything personal. Only in the West has this changed to some degree, under the influence of the Renaissance. In most religious art the viewer must be able to deduce precisely who is being depicted and what the image means, based purely on the symbols contained within the work.
Exactly the same rules apply to etiquette, where the right hand is the ‘good hand’, the guest of honour sits at table to the right of the host or hostess and so on. The less intimately people know each other, the easier it is for misunderstandings to arise, so it’s important that when relative strangers meet no one acts in a way that’s unexpected or hard to interpret, unless they have good reasons for doing so. We act formally and adhere to set rules. In theory it doesn’t matter what those rules are, as long as they can be clearly recognized and easily remembered. Black-and-white, therefore, is the message. The natural preponderance of right-handers automatically makes left-handedness anathema.
In literature, finally, whatever the language, left often means clumsy, duplicitous and sly. Presumably this flows directly from the fact that for centuries literature reflected the established opinions of church and state, so that as a whole it deployed symbolism approved from on high. In fact it did a fair amount to canonize a culture’s officially sanctioned symbolism and set it in stone. literature has always been an important source for lexicographers and teachers, and through them the negative connotations of a language are perpetuated and reinforced. All things considered, it’s no wonder that formalized metaphors involving the left as a concept are a good deal harsher and more negative than can be justified by anything in our everyday experience.
9
Witchcraft and Pogroms
Devilish practices and black magic clearly belong to the realm of inversion. At a witches’ sabbath everything moves anticlockwise, in a direct reversal of the customs of the church. The Devil, damned rascal that he is, demands to have his arse kissed by his followers. Unholy black replaces virgin white and the congregation worships evil instead of good, death instead of life, lechery instead of fidelity and abstinence. Black magic has no characteristics of its own; it consists purely of negation and is therefore derivative, taking its form from the precise reversal of what is regarded as valuable and holy in any normal religion. So just as it seems natural that the bad guy in an old-fashioned cowboy film wears a black hat, in European art the Devil and his accomplices are left-handed. In the modern world this has little significance, but it may have made an unfortunate impression in the past. left-handed people might quite easily have been seen as confederates of the Devil in panicky times, for example when people were obsessed by a fear of witches, and ordinary citizens were accused, condemned and killed on even more tenuous grounds.
Yet astonishingly this never happened. A group of comparable size, the homosexual segment of the population, was persecuted with grim determination down through the centuries. Jews, gypsies and tramps have all been targeted from time to time, but the left-handed were spared persecution. Even in those thousands of witch-trials, a defendant’s left-handedness was hardly ever presented as proof, or even as corroborating evidence of contact with the evil one, unlike any number of other features found on the left side of the body, such as birthmarks, warts and scars, which were far less likely to be discovered.
The main thing that saved left-handers was probably the fact that they never presented themselves as a group. Jews and gypsies grouped up quite noticeably, separating themselves from the rest of society in various ways that were impossible to ignore, sensing that they were a distinct people and presenting themselves as such, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entailed. It’s always dangerous to stand out. Adopting an isolated position makes the reserve that naturally smoulders among the general population as a result of the uncanny valley effect flare up into a dangerous form of jealousy.
| A witch kisses the Devil in the appropriate place. |  |
Groups that wilfully separate themselves arouse curiosity. The distrustful vulture instinct makes everyone else wonder: ‘What are they up to?’ People feel shut out and think to themselves: they’re acting so secretively, they must be in possession of something interesting that they’re trying to keep for themselves. It’s a mechanism seen in oper ation daily in every school playground. If it doesn’t quickly become clear what a group has that’s so desirable – and it rarely becomes clear, because there’s generally nothing involved that could appeal to non-members – then the most dire suspicions arise. People begin to think it’s less a matter of a pact formed to protect and guard a desirable possession and more a conspiracy against the rest of society. Once this stage is reached, the jealousy and frustration of those who feel excluded become combined with fear – an explosive mix. It’s at this point that strange, frightening stories start to circulate, and to be believed: Freemasons sacrifice babies at their meetings; Jews dine on Christian children; gypsies will steal your offspring and sell them as chimney sweeps or worse. Those people must worship the Devil, otherwise why would they be so secretive?
Odd or exceptional groups are liable to be made scapegoats for events that have nothing to do with them. You can easily blame a bunch of people who are strange and secretive for a failed harvest or some such natural disaster. The conspiracy of Jewish financiers planning to take over the world, which the Nazis believed they had uncovered, was nothing more, and nothing less, than a modern instalment of a serial drama that had been running for centuries, each episode leading sooner or later to the same outcome: violent death, where possible on a grand scale.
The left-handed don’t feel themselves to be a group in any sense. Even in this era of effortless global communication, it’s proven impossible to create a viable association of left-handed people in Europe. Only in America does anything of the kind exist. Just as right-handers will often fail to notice that an acquaintance is left-handed, it may take two left-handers a long time to discover they have a hand preference in common. It’s probably this lack of solidarity, the absence of any group feeling or group behaviour, that explains why the left-handed have never attracted the kind of attention that’s proven fatal to so many other groups.
A second reason probably lies in the size of the category. Around 10 per cent of people are left-handed and they are fairly evenly spread across the population. In some families the percentage is rather higher, in others lower, and the phenomenon occurs slightly more often in men than in women – a difference that’s measurable but too small for anyone to notice in daily life. There the variability ends. Everyone’s circle of family, friends and acquaintances includes one or more left-handers, so persecution would come at considerable cost: sooner or later it would inevitably mean personal losses for us all. That’s precisely the opposite of what pogroms and so forth are all about: us against them with the two kept as strictly separate as possible. That could never happen with attacks on left-handers. There are simply too many of them, and they’re too evenly spread.
So what about homosexuals? They too make up roughly 10 per cent of the population and there’s no greater concentration of them in any particular group, yet they are one of the most persecuted human categories in history, even down to the present day. One obvious reason for the difference in treatment is that homosexuality is no mere symbolic violation of the natural order of things but rather a matter of actual behaviour, even if it’s less what homosexuals do with each other than the thought of it that makes the heterosexual majority so nervous.
We respond as we do because our personal and social lives, from our individual identities to the security provided by marriage, and by familial rights and duties, depend entirely upon ordered sexual relations. Any breach causes chaos, which we loathe as cats loathe cold water. Adultery threatens the permanency of relationships and therefore inadvertently endangers the integrity of a family’s property. Divorce actually erodes that property, which is why in many parts of the world it’s regarded as worse than adultery. Instead of getting divorced, society would prefer you to keep quiet about your bit on the side, even in the case of a long-term extra-marital relationship. Two things demonstrate that this is very much bound up with money and with the security of existence. First, until Napoleonic times marriage was mainly intended for the propertied classes; those who lived hand to mouth simply moved in together without a marriage certificate. Second, in our modern world there’s a clear link between prosperity and conjugal ethics. The richer the society and the more security it offers, the likelier people are to experience a bond with a partner as galling and terminate it.
Worse even than adultery and divorce are the fruits of illegiti mate relationships. Bastard children tangle the web of kinship. We can no longer be certain who is truly ‘one of us’ or even exactly who ‘we’ are. The effects of incest are even more disastrous, especially when children are born as a result. Incest is fiercely condemned more for this reason than because of fears for the health of the offspring. Although not free of risk, semi-incestuous relationships, between cousins for example, are normal in many cultures as long as they are sanctioned by marriage.
Homosexuality brings us even closer to complete disarray. It not only crosses the boundaries of the sexual order, always a precarious struc ture, it cocks a snook at it, tossing everything upside-down, even the foundation on which it all rests: the formation of pairs between the two sexes. Homosexuality inverts the most central of all sexual values, in a ‘devilish’ reversal that seems to strike at the root of the continued existence of the species. It’s as if homosexuals provide the rest of humanity with a glimpse into the miasma beneath our feet. They are not thanked for it.
From a rational point of view, all this nervousness is sheer nonsense. The human species isn’t going to be wiped out by a bit of gay sex, but this obvious fact does nothing to reduce the fear, which is the source of some shocking aggression, especially from the most violent and volatile of citizens: young men who feel uncertain about their sexuality and their place in the world. The more anxious a society becomes about sex, and the more problematic and emotionally charged direct contact between men and women is as a result, the louder its young men will shout about honour and pride. They’ll be all the more frightened of homosexuality and hit out all the harder against it.
One thing that makes the position of gay people a good deal more difficult still is that homosexuality can be concealed. Keeping left-handedness secret is almost impossible. The hiding of their proclivity only makes homosexuals as a group more vulnerable to persecution, since it means their numbers can be grossly underestimated. With a few exceptions, this has happened all over the world in all eras. It’s meant that heterosexuals could bask in the illusion that gay sex did not happen in their own circles, and therefore that gay people could safely be persecuted. It goes without saying that this quite often led to unpleasant surprises, but they too were hushed up wherever possible. So great is the taboo that even today in large parts of the world it’s easy to find people who’ll swear, hand on heart, that homosexuality doesn’t exist in their country. In such circumstances it’s fairly easy to make it a capital offence.
Anyone who thinks witchcraft and witch-hunts are a thing of the past is sadly mistaken, and I don’t mean the fashionable tinkering with white magic that’s become popular in Western Europe among ladies with time on their hands and esoteric interests. I mean the real, old-fashioned stuff. Mind you, what is real? Not the witches. They tended to be silly innocents with the misfortune to have attracted the wrong kind of attention for one reason or another. The persecution, though, was and still is a bitter reality.
In and around Kenya and Tanzania, the victims are mainly albino children. They are seen as possessed by evil powers and subjected to murderous violence as a result. Nastier still is the lucrative trade in albino-based magical remedies that emerged in the late twentieth century. Albino children are slaughtered for their body parts, which are then boiled to make soup.
In Nigeria too, children are systematically branded witches and excluded, mistreated or even killed. Their inherent childish innocence makes them an attractive target, since it’s all the more shocking and frightening when an innocent creature turns out to harbour evil. The witch-hunters are spiritual leaders, usually with excessively devout Christian backgrounds, who feel a need to create a distinctive profile for themselves, to use a high-sounding Western term. Child witch-hunts are a distorted form of aggressive evangelism and the persecution begins not so much because the appearance or behaviour of the victim has attracted attention as because the zealot has something to gain. The invention of an intangible threat that might pop up anywhere without warning is a tried and tested means of keeping the flock together and making it toe the line, especially if you can then emerge as its saviour, the only person who, as a special agent of the lord, can recognize and neutralize the danger. Meanwhile, along with the respect and gratitude of believers, a great deal of money will come your way, since driving out evil is not something you can be expected to do on the cheap. So the exorcist’s knife cuts both ways.
Elsewhere in the world it’s always been mainly women who fall prey to witch-hunts, often widows who have a rather marginal position in society and lives of poverty and solitude. In India hundreds of people die every year after being branded as witches by their neighbours. In that big, crowded country no one paid much attention until the nation was suddenly caught with its trousers down in the autumn of 2009. Five women in a village called Pattharghatia were chased through the streets naked, whipped and made to eat excrement by a frenzied crowd several hundred strong. All this took place at the instigation of six other women, who claimed they had the gift of the holy spirit and were therefore able to recognize the witches who were about to bring calamity upon the village. For once the police stepped in and arrested eleven villagers, including the six who had claimed supernatural powers yet astonishingly were not witches themselves. The reason for the intervention of the authorities was that someone had made a video recording of the event, which was shown nationwide on television.
There are countless possible grounds for concluding that someone is a witch. A frightening appearance – albinism being one example – or a marginal position in society are often regarded as signs, but any deviation from the norm will do, anything that might get a person noticed. There is one aberration that’s never involved, as far as we know: left-handedness. It wasn’t even a factor in the witch trials that wreaked havoc in Europe several centuries ago. This isn’t so odd as it may at first appear, since the widespread persecution of alleged accomplices of the Devil, his female accomplices in particular, did not arise out of the blue.