The following is my column from the August 2, 2007 edition of the Falls Church News-Press (www.fcnp.com). It is a cleaned up version, so to speak, of a blog entry I posted here earlier in ths week:

THE 8% SOLUTION

By Nicholas F. Benton

We now have something purportedly definitive about the cause of left-handedness, a characteristic of somewhere between 8% and 10% of the population worldwide. This week, news has come of an Oxford University study that claims a gene that causes left-handedness has been discovered, and that it is associated with a mildly-elevated disposition toward schizophrenia.

As a southpaw myself, I remain skeptical. It seems akin to the claim that there is a “gay gene.” Some hail that notion, since it suggests that same-sex, or gay, sexual orientation is hard-wired into biology and not a learned trait (that can also be unlearned). But there are others, such as rightwing religious types, who also welcome the claim, saying it offers hope that gayness can be exterminated, by exterminating its gene, one way or another.

I much prefer to believe that, whether in the form of a single gene or something more nuanced, both left-handedness and being gay are built into nature for good reasons.

I have often thought, in fact, that there is a “cosmic dissymmetry” in the very fabric of the universe that accounts for its creation and development. Our universe is bi-polar in nature, which means it works by an interaction of a two-sided, positive/negative, etc., dynamic that can unfold into almost anything.

As manifestations of the universe, human beings are also bi-polar, with two of most everything including genders and sides of the brain. We think in a bi-polar way, also, with almost all knowledge that we process, and language skills, reducible to the 0/1 binary code used in even the most advanced computers.

But if the nature of bi-polarity were symmetrical, then there would be no way for it to exercise any sustainable dynamism. Equilibrium, in this sense, equals no action. It takes disequilibrium, through the factor of an ordered dissymmetry, for the initial spark of creation and an on-going, evolving progress of the cosmos to occur.

In my view, left-handedness and gay identity are two “clues,” so to speak, of many manifestations of disequilibrium in nature, although they are not, of course, directly related to each other. But each is about 8% to 10% of the population. The 2000 U.S. Census seems to confirm this for gays when you add in reasonably-derived hidden numbers reflecting the extreme social stigma against being gay that still exists, and the fact that the gay phenomenon is not always experienced in a sexual way.

I first associated gay identity with the natural phenomenon of left-handedness in the editorial I wrote for the first edition of the Gay Sunshine newspaper back in 1970.

In the human context, the ostensibly gay manifestation of universal dissymmetry has always been around in nature and history, although not always understood in the sexual fashion it is nowadays. It can be seen as represented by an impulse to temper the tendencies of societies to be overly militaristic. In ancient Greece, the gay impulse and democracy seem to be related.

It could be argued that it is nature’s 8% to 10% dissymmetry, in general, that allows for progress toward a more perfect human society, pushing it in favor of equal rights and the affirmation of diversity and against a solely testosterone-dominated model.

This dissymmetry optimizes the potential for the society as a whole to progress through the optimization of the creative potential of the maximum number of its participants. These are manifested through universal education, advancements in science and the arts, and special care for the abandoned, young and old.

Societies in which this dissymmetry is suppressed – met with suspicion, hate and even a zeal for extermination – tend to become militant and genocidal. Where sheer testosterone is not tempered by this natural countervailing factor, brutality reigns and humanity sinks into ignorance and self-destruction.

I would argue that this has always been the case. It is only in this modern era, with more access to freedom of speech and protected diversity of behaviors, including sexual ones, that the gay impulse has begun to be identified and experienced as we now do, even if that remains, in terms of broader natural and historical contexts, too limited.     

But this theory suggests that an on-going, active push-back against tendencies to suppress the 8% to 10% factor is key to the long-term survival of civilization, itself, and even, theoretically, to the cosmos.

******

P.S. The following is a letter to a friend concerning this column written August 14, 2007 to help her clarify it’s point. I think it is useful to add here:

Carol,

I appreciate your comments here. I perhaps did not make it clear enough in the column that, like lefthandedness, gay identity is merely one “symptom,” as it were of the “8% solution,” but that the “8% solution” translates in real life into a lot of counterprevailing forms and modes of expression, including but not at all limited to gay identity.

It is also not linear or one-dimensional, such that an individual personality, for example, especially in the context of dominant social norms, can often if not usually manifest conflicted and complex behavior and even personal perceptions of life and the world. Alas, this is what keeps anyone from being “perfect” or even an archetype of anything at all.

In the case of self-identified gay people, including lesbians, for example, it is perhaps wrong to consider them any kind of “community” (who knows where that concept came from?) because they can be so radically different in every way that people, in general, are different from each other. Their commonality is a political construct necessary to achieve a certain specific variety of civil rights and protections against hate and discrimination.

One way or another, we slog along as a species, but must be mindful that “different drummers” are hard-wired into our collective make-up and are, overall, a positive and indispensible element of our evolution.

Best, Nick.