Free The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits Page B

Jews’, but some filthy people were filthier than others. The filthy Krauts, for example.
    This is where the existence of the uncanny valley returns to haunt us. It may have a useful effect in encouraging us to keep our distance from odd-looking and therefore possibly dangerous members of the same group, including clearly deranged, seriously ill or dead individuals, but it also creates in us a powerful aversion towards just about every aberration. Crooked noses, unfamiliar skin colours and narrow eyes – conspicuous characteristics have led Westerners to look askance at entire peoples. There is something not quite kosher about those who look that little bit different, or so our uncanny valley instincts warn us. We feel slightly uneasy in the company of people with features that are uncommon within our own group.
    Exactly which features these are depends entirely on what’s normal for the group in question. The Chinese find Westerners strange, Westerners are suspicious of black people, who in turn have their own ideas about the Chinese. Redheads stick out from the crowd almost everywhere and as children they can easily fall prey to ridicule and bullying. Dwarfism, bandy legs, baldness, hirsutism, conjoined eyebrows, albinism – you name it, any of these can cause suspicion, as can exotic clothing, strange eating habits or unfamiliar cultural etiquette.
    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