“Self-reflection,” etching by Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards: A battleground and mediator of cultural development
Psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist bites off a huge chunk in the second half of the book I’m reading. I’m sympathetic, of course, because I probably agree with his premise that Western society and culture have opted for what might be called “left-brain solutions” that have resulted in the despoliation of Earth to the extent that we now face decades if not centuries of chaos and disintegration due to the Climate Crisis.
“Science” of course, has given us the insight without providing the broader critique of our socioeconomic assumptions that have led us to the Abyss. It takes a philosopher – or an artist or even a theologian – to see not the “big picture” but the broader scope of our condition and peril, and just how difficult and arduous it would be if we were to decide “to do something about it.” That’s a left-brain phrase, by the way, because I don’t believe there’s anything we can do about it. That’s the problem, McGilchrist might say, we’ve ”done” enough already! We’ve screwed the pooch and ourselves for good. (McGilchrist would not have said it that way, at least not in print.)
I don’t know where hope fits into McGilchrist’s thesis, but he might say that where there’s art there’s hope. It might be the other way around, too, which is paradoxical but, because of that, it probably leans toward what a late and dear seminary professor might call “a species of Truth.”
“Climate Change,” by Spencer and Joe Vidich: Left-brain solutions have brought us to the Abyss
There is a feeling of hopelessness in all this because we’re underwater amid left-brain solutions to problems that have confronted humanity from the beginning: How do we feed, clothe and house ourselves and keep our offspring safe in order to propagate future generations that are equally fed, clothed, housed and safe?
Western “civilization” has concocted a variety of systems for dealing with these issues; indeed, humanity generally came up with solutions as varied as there are regions of the planet. The problem with the West, McGilchrist contends, is that we sold our souls to our rebellious left brains – the portion of our frontal cortex where language resides and which deals with external stimuli by chopping it into bits in order to make something of it. It’s taken centuries, but such solutions, accompanied by the denigration of right-brain perspective – art, philosophy and religion, for example – have taken us to the edge of the Abyss: And, in my opinion, the rest of the story isn’t going to be pretty.
McGilchrist began his thoughtful career as a student of Literature but became disenchanted with criticism as a discipline, which McGilchrist believes wrenches the heart from a work of poetry, for example, by – you guessed it – chopping it into bits in order to make something of it. What’s made is usually hogwash, according to McGilchrist; explaining a poem or a painting by paraphrasing it leaves it mangled on the ground either dead or breathing its last. So, McGilchrist switched to medicine and became a psychiatrist. Treating schizophrenics led to a 20-year project of research that resulted in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
(McGilchrist says the title is based on a fable elaborated by Friedrich Nietzsche, in which the emissary rebels, erroneously believing that he knows enough to go it alone, without the master’s broader wisdom, whereupon civilization collapses. Diligent search for this fable finds nothing of the kind in Nietzsche, although the philosopher does go on at length about masters and slaves, which one day would fuel the fires of Hitler’s Holocaust in the name of a “master race.” G.W.F. Hegel tells a master-slave story in Phenomenology, but it doesn’t resemble McGilchrist’s. Methinks the author either confabulated the “fable” from his considerable knowledge base or made it out of whole cloth. It does throw a little water on the author’s discourse, but while the origin of his title may be questionable, McGilchrist’s theory is not. He’s on to something, folks.)
“Metaphor,” by Leo Symon: The only way we know anything
There’s something metaphorical about all this, the only way we know anything at all – by analogy. McGilchrist personalizes the inevitable contest between human beings’ divided brains but only after in-depth (and somewhat eye-glazing) discussion of the human brain’s anatomy and physiology. Among other things, he informs ignorance such as mine that all living things have divided brains, which seems to have been nature’s evolutionary way of providing animals with two types of simultaneous perception necessary for survival: environmental (right brain, aka “The Master”) and specific (left brain, aka “The Emissary”).
McGilchrist argues from brain research that the right hemisphere is our primary mode of perception, but that left-brain particularity is essential, too; however, it’s also essential that the left brain’s granular perception be “returned” to the right for what might be called final processing, so that perspective not be lost. Inherent in all this millisecond-by-millisecond exchange of perception is the very nature of perception itself and the apparent mystery that there is but one consciousness to be addressed.
And one other thing: These two aspects of perception are in competition, and the result is the innumerable ways we have of expressing whatever we believe to be true or not true: the broad range of human activity in the development of human society from hunter-gatherer groups to nation states, from skinning game and painting the walls of deep, dark caves, to air-conditioning, nuclear warfare, Andy Warhol and exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars.
Oh, yes, and also the development of philosophy and religion.
As erudite as McGilchrist’s approach seems to be, this book becomes intensely personal because everyone has a brain; but more, everyone, to some extent, thinks about what they believe and cares about what they know, none of which begins cerebrally but originates in the way we feel here and now and have felt in the past. We are formed by experience and our perception anchors us in the here and now and ever will be: past, present and future. (Even as I’m writing this, struggling to “get it right,” I’m aware of falling short of whatever the “Truth” might be in this telling of another man’s beliefs. It’s not about accuracy, though I am concerned about that, but essence, that which is elusive and irreducible, for which I have no suitable metaphor.)
I should know better than to write about a book I have yet to finish, but I’m urged to respond, somehow, because of the way I feel as though these insights have made me more sensitive about the way I think – not what but how and, perhaps, why. I’ve tried for years to write a memoir that doesn’t make me sad, largely because I’ve done inexplicable, often harmful things to people I love – or should love, because if love is, indeed, not just a noun, I’m not sure I always feel its authentic content. And, right there, is the problem so many friends have noticed for years: “Ron, get out of your head”; which means, “Quit breaking it down into bits to see what you can make of it.”
I just wish it didn’t always feel like starting over.
The pelican papers 