What is amazing, therefore, is the remarkable negativity associated with 'leftness.' Southpaws, who make up a good fraction of the population, know just how anti-left we are because they know how difficult we make water fountains, sports equipment, and tools for them. One famous blessing in the Bible is, "O Jerusalem, if I forget thee, may my right hand its cunning lose." But what if the person praying is left handed? The left has always been referred to by derogatory adjectives, such as 'sinister', 'gauche', or 'nigh,' whereas it is common parlance to refer to the right as 'droit' or 'dexter' which, like the English "right" means both "correct" and "to the right hand side": someone who is 'dextrous' is also coordinated or clever. One who is confused is often referred to as "out in left field." Feared and shunned groups have always been associated with the left: Jews were made to walk on the left hand side of the street, witches were said to dance counterclockwise or leftwards (as opposed to the English 'widdershin' dance clockwise toward the rising sun), and one complaint people made against the Gypsies was that they never cut their nails on their left hands.
Many societies associate the Left with the feminine, which is often also despised or subordinated. In Qabalah, the left hand side of the Tree of Life (Sfirot) is associated with Rigor and Constraint, which are said to be feminine qualities, whereas the right is associated with Mercy and Freedom, which are thought to be masculine. In Tantric mysticism, the left nadi or kundalini channel is thought to be lunar and feminine, whereas the right is thought to be solar and masculine. It is a well known fact that faces are profoundly asymmetrical: if one half is taken with its reflection in a mirror, it looks completely different from the original face. According to some Hindu texts, this is because the left side of the face is feminine (and 'sinister') whereas the right is masculine. In marriage ceremonies in many parts of the world, the woman stands to the left of the man, which indicates her subordinate position. Not surprisingly, the wedding ring is usually placed on her left hand. Shaking of hands (when men greet) is almost always to be done with the right hand - a firm grip is expected, and if not received (as might be the case with southpaws) the other person is thought to be feminine or homosexual (a "fairy", so to speak.) A surprising survey once revealed that most women preferred to have their left side photographed, as they considered that their "better side."
In Islam, the 'impure' bodily functions such as urination are to be assisted with the left hand; the 'evil eye' has always traditionally been the left one in Eastern Europe; and salt is usually thrown over one's left shoulder since it is on the left side where each man's devil is said to perch, opposed to the guardian angel on his right. Driving, riding, and walking are always supposed to be on the right side, except of course in England, where it is reversed. The left knee is never bent in bowing, and people in portraits almost never face left. In the Bible, Jesus is pierced in his left side by the Roman spear, and the midrash say that it was Jacob's left thigh that was 'smote in the hollow' by the angel he wrestled with. And in occult circles, the Left Hand Path is associated with darkness, black magic, and inversion. On a map, the West is to the Left, and it has always been associated with death : a dying soldier is said to "go west." Not surprisingly, the Nazi swastika, unlike the symbol as it normally appears in iconography, turns to the left (counterclockwise) rather than the right.
To continue our tour of the despised left, we need some neurology. The brain has two hemispheres, the right and left frontal lobe, each of which functions somewhat independently, governing the opposite side of the body. The right lobe of the brain controls the left half of the body, and is associated with creativity, synthesis, pattern recognition, structural relationships, imagination, and symbolic meaning, in contrast to the left lobe, which is much more analytical, logical, linear, mathematical, spatial, and iconic than the right. Is it any surprise then, that the functions of the right lobe, which governs our left side, and is primarily involved in the 'arts' rather than the 'sciences', have been consistently denigrated in our rational, technologically-oriented civilization? Artists are often despised as 'bleeding hearts,' homosexuals, and so forth by our society, which still maintains the image of the starving, suffering, desperate, flaky, living-on-the-edge, disshevelled artist as stereotype. The right hemisphere is also primarily metaphorical rather than verbal, examining things by how they feel rather than how they seem , and how they connect rather than act , so its functions are not adequate for the modernist demand for precision, exactness, punctuality, and detail; right hemisphere-oriented people often are dismissed as "wishy-washy", "touchy-feely", and "daydreamers" because they are not suited to the left-hemisphere-based society around them.
And another stop on our tour of the Left is its adoption as a political term. In the French Assembly before the revolution, the king's loyalists - nobles, aristocrats, courtiers, and supporters of the monarchy - sat to his right, whereas the bourgeouis, democrats, republicanists, and opponents of the monarchy sat to his left. Ever since then, those who have advocated making society more egalitarian, liberal, and popularly managed and less hierarchical and stratified have been considered "left-wing." (Others see the origin of the terminology in the division of Hegel's followers. Those Hegelians who remained idealist were called "Hegelians of the right" whereas those who, like Marx, took a materialist position on the dialectic, were called "Hegelians of the left.") Today, of course, people associate the Left with Soviet Communism, not realizing the remarkable diversity of "leftism" today. Nonetheless, "left-wingers" even in the nineteenth century were being accused of subversion, revolution, atheism, traitorousness, and conspiracy, making me wonder whether the choice of sitting on the left of the king by the anti-monarchists was not a conscious one, and why artists and filmmakers were the first ones to be targeted in the Leftist manhunt of the McCarthy Era. Perhaps the modern political trend of "leftism," which has been blamed for just about every social evil ranging from family breakdown to declining morals, is part of a longer tradition of the despised Left.
There is new research into 'southpawism' these days which suggests amazing things about left-handers, which comprise about one-sixth to one-tenth of the population (no one is really sure about the figure worldwide, which complicates the calculation.) Apparently, left handers tend to die earlier than right handers, for unknown reasons that seem to go beyond the political 'handism' of the society of large. (The "misfortune index" for southpaws - accidents, depression, mental illness, suicide, language disorders, and divorce - is, for no known reasons, unusually high.) There are many ongoing studies pertaining to handedness and hemisphere dominance, gender, homosexuality, creativity, and personality. The data does seem to suggest that southpaws are somewhat different than their right-handed counterparts, particularly as regards language ability and its brain localization, but the data remains inconclusive. In most animals, some degree of laterality is apparent (some fish have fins and eyes only on one side, lobsters often have one claw larger than the other, and even in inverterbrates such as corals some functions, like digestion, are lateralized.) Handedness itself does appear to be a feature of human bipedalism, though it does seem that other mammals that walk on hind legs - rats, apes, ferrets, and others - do seem to have a 'paw preference' which is roughly evenly distributed - even numbers of lefties, righties, and ambidexters.
According to one study, left-handers make up about 4 or 5 percent of the population - but in mental asylums they number 16 to 30 percent! Left-handedness is disproportionately large among Punjabis, Hottentots, Fijians, and many other "primitive" peoples. In the Bible, some descriptions suggest that the Benjamite tribe of Israel may have had an unusually high number of southpaws. Body laterality - i.e. eye dominance or foot dominance (one leg is often longer than the other and thus leads in walking) - does not seem to correlate perfectly with handedness. The origins of sinistrality are hotly debated: so far its incidence is too small to be considered hereditary in nature. So, many theories focus on such things as cultural origins (tool construction) or physical factors (Earth's coriolis effect) or biological dispositions (such as the asymmetry of visceral distribution.) The rightward bias of many civilizations appears to manifest particularly in driving (which side of the road), cradling infants, circumnabulation (particularly in processions & dances), and reading & writing. ("Backwards" writing - right to left - is diagnosed as dyslexia in our society.)
That leads some researchers to feel that handedness dominance, if not handedness itself, may have been born with human 'civilization' - namely, culture, written language, and settled life. It may have had something to do with the decrease in hunting & gathering (which require both hands), the growing importance of warfare (one anthropologist suggested the need to protect the heart with the closest hand), the use of writing tools, or the growing use of left-hemispheric calculating brain functions and the atrophy of right-brain ones. Historians are searching for the history of handedness, and archaeologists are examining its prehistory, and the verdict appears to be (though no one is certain) that right-handed dominance and history may have been born at the same time. The implications of that are staggering, to say the least, and a whole new chapter may have to be added in "Man's Ascent to Civilization," in which one-half of him/herself was cast aside in order to initiate "progress."
by Steve Mizrach