richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

W H Y T H E R E A I. M O S T C E R T A I N L Y IS NO G O D 115
think that it's springtime back on Earth!' You may not immediately
see what's wrong with this, so deeply ingrained is the unconscious
northern hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and
even some who don't. 'Unconscious' is exactly right. That is where
consciousness-raising comes in. It is for a deeper reason than
gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy
maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid
consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of
our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children
would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has
no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise
their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents - and, by
the way, giving children something with which to surprise their
parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.
It was the feminists who raised my consciousness of the power
of consciousness-raising. 'Herstory' is obviously ridiculous, if only
because the 'his' in 'history' has no etymological connection with
the masculine pronoun. It is as etymologically silly as the sacking,
in 1999, of a Washington official whose use of 'niggardly' was held
to give racial offence. But even daft examples like 'niggardly' or
'herstory' succeed in raising consciousness. Once we have
smoothed our philological hackles and stopped laughing, herstory
shows us history from a different point of view. Gendered pronouns
notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising. He or
she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style
could ever allow himself or herself to write like this. But if we can
just get over the clunking infelicity of the language, it raises our
consciousness to the sensitivities of half the human race. Man,
mankind, the Rights of Man, all men are created equal, one man
one vote - English too often seems to exclude woman. * When I was
young, it never occurred to me that women might feel slighted by a
phrase like 'the future of man'. During the intervening decades, we
have all had our consciousness raised. Even those who still use
'man' instead of 'human' do so with an air of self-conscious
apology - or truculence, taking a stand for traditional language,
even deliberately to rile feminists. All participants in the Zeitgeist
* Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin homo (Greek anthropo-)
means human, as opposed to vir (andro-) which means man, and fetnina (gyne-)
which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all humanity, where andrology
and gynecology are sexually exclusive branches of medicine.