CHOOSING SIDES: Why is an unbiased look rarer than a Left-Handed Pope?

This Wednesday past, April 1, a rocket took off for the moon.  And while it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day prank, the designation, Artemis II (Roman Numerals for 'two' ) evoked, for many, an association with Apollo 11 (Arabic Numerals for 'eleven' ) which carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to their first giant leaps across the moon’s surface in 1969.  And just within the deadline set by President John F. Kennedy on September 12, 1962:

“We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skill, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too.”

And while the battle for the skies between the USA and USSR had been continuing since the launch of Sputnik, and the technology developed by the Nazis in WWII (Roman Numerals) the Cuban Missile Crisis, following a month after Kennedy’s speech, both stiffened America’s resolve and loosened Congress’s grip on the purse-strings.

…Some cynics might even claim that China’s Chang 4 Moon Mission has played a similar role in accelerating NASA’s progress to the Artemis II launchpad. 

To us in the UK, April 9 next week marks another key date for the battle for the skies.  Back in 1969 (102 days before Armstrong’s moonwalk) Concorde had its first UK test flight from its Filton Airbase near Bristol.  And as a ten-year-old spending every school holiday with my grandparents in Weston-super-Mare, the sight of this big, silver bird, with the ungainly beak, buzzing (and booming) over the beach, and our garden, became inextricably linked in my imagination with the Apollo 11 astronauts some 24,000 miles higher.

While David Bowie’s Space Oddity released on 11 July 1969, nine days before Neil Armstrong’s Moon Walk, supplied the soundtrack.

Unfortunately for Concorde, however, March 1969 also saw the first test flight for Boeing’s 747 (February 9, 1969, c.f. March 2, 1969, Concorde’s first French test flight).  And while Concorde, as a singular feat of Anglo-French engineering, sizzled with the ‘white heat of the technological revolution,’ promised in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech, the 747 promised that higher goal so precious to us in The Business of Pleasure: bums on seats (circa 4 X Concorde's capacity).

Some 1600 miles from Weston-super-Mare, and 2,500 years before Kennedy’s speech, the Greek seaside town of Clazomenae (near modern Izmir, Turkey) found another little boy looking up into the sky with wonder in his eyes.  And when he grew up, Anaxagoras moved his new start-up, ‘Natural Philosophy,’150 miles to Athens where it caught on fast, influencing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (the latter being tutor to another little boy, Alexander The Great).*

It was Anaxagoras who is believed to have said:  “We look up when we imagine the future, and down when we recall the past.”  But this is something you can try at home.  And when you’ve looked up and down, try looking to either side.  Feel free to choose which way to look first, and then have a think about how you feel when you turn in each direction? Then take a look at the following passage from a seminal paper on the subject of 'directionality.'**

'Emotional valence: choosing sides.

Across languages and cultures, good things are often associated with the right side of space and bad things with the left. This association is evident in positive and negative idioms like my right hand man and two left feet and in the meanings of English words derived from the Latin for “right” (dexter) and “left” (sinister).

Beyond language, people also conceptualise good and bad in terms of left-right space, but not always in the way linguistic and cultural conventions suggest.  Rather, people’s implicit associations between space and valence are body specific. When asked to decide which of two products to buy, which of two applicants to hire, or which two alien creatures look more trustworthy, right- and left-handers respond differently. Right-handers tend to prefer the product, person or creature presented on their right side but left-handers tend to prefer the one on their left. This pattern persists even when people make judgements orally, without using their hands to respond. Children as young as five years old already make evaluations according to handedness and spatial location, judging animals shown on their dominant side to be nicer and smarter than animals on their non-dominant side.

The implicit association between valence and left-right space influences people’s memory and their motor responses as well as their judgements. In one experiment participants were shown the locations of fictitious positive and negative events on a map, and asked to recall the locations later.  Memory errors were predicted by the valence of the event and the handedness of the participant: right handers were biased to locate positive events too far to the right and negative events too far to the left on the map, whereas left-handers showed the opposite bias. In reaction time tasks, right- and left-handers were faster to classify words as negative when responding with their non-dominant hand.'

And yet when it comes to the Cinema and TV Chapters of The Business of Pleasure, it doesn’t seem to matter what hand you snaffle the popcorn with, according to some 2012 research which concludes:

‘In summation, our analyses showed that religion, handedness and most psychometrics did not make a difference with regard to the affective evaluations of film directionality. This seems to point to a primacy of the “right” that is robust and enduring. A consideration of this empirically observed phenomenon should be incorporated into future study and theory with regard to film and the moving image.’ ***

Of course it’s one thing to move your eyes left to right, and quite another to move your centre of Empire, as the Emperor Constantine did when he relocated from Rome to Constantinople, around 900 miles East, in 330 AD. Constantine already knew the area well. After all it was only 50 miles away from Nicaea, where, five years earlier, he’d nailed down the date of one of the most significant festivals in the Christian calendar by decreeing that it would be celebrated 'on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox…'

…Happy Easter!

DT Friday 3^rd April, 2026

(Left Hander)

 *Sky-gazing would ultimately result in Anaxagoras being forced out of Athens for impiety after describing the Sun as a ‘mass of burning rock’ rather than a god.

 **Bodily Relativity  Daniel Casasanto, 2024

 ***’Which way did he go? Directionality of Film Character and Camera Movement and Subsequent Spectator Interpretation’  Matthew L. Egizii, James Denny, Kimberley A. Neuendorf, Paul D Skaisi, May 2012