In what may be one of the most random posts on this blog, I wanted to write about a pattern that may exist. The English letter and the Hebrew letter is written from left to right, while the Arabic letter is written from right to left. The English sentence is written from left to right; the Hebrew sentence and the Arabic sentence is written from right to left. Any cultural pattern?
In discussing this with a friend of mine, he posited that two great forces drive reality - Justice and Mercy. These forces are driven by the attributes at work in our system - Justice is essentially the way it works and Mercy is the way we want it to work. (Alot more could be said about this and perhaps a later post will address it.)
His thesis is that cultures which write letters from left to right are based on Justice, while cultures that read and write from right to left are based on Mercy. Thus, English and Hebrew language-based cultures are Justice-based, while Arabic cultures are Mercy-based. Further, the writing of the sentence either confirms or offsets this primary emphasis (primary because of the building block nature of the emphasis). Thus, English language-based cultures are Justice-based with an additional Justice emphasis. Hebrew language-based cultures are Justice-based with an additional Mercy emphasis. Arabic language-based cultures are Mercy-based with an additional Mercy emphasis.
I think that there is probably something to this novel theory. I spend much of my time reading annual reports. The format in most of these reports reads with the most recent on the left backwards to the right. In a sense, we are reading history backwards and the way management wants it to work. If, on the other hand, we were to read the reports as they historically occurred, we would be reading with Justice - which is really the thing I want to do with an annual report, but not typically what the management would want. Just a thought.
