A shift toward slow?

Powelliphanta are slow to mature

La charité est une pure attention à l’existence d’autrui. - Louis Lavelle

The relationship between the conditions of our life and our perception of happiness isn't necessarily a simple and direct correlation. Which might be obvious to many people. While it might start off this way, particularly in regard to meeting our basic needs, at some point that relationship appears to invert. And the idea of 'post-traumatic growth' complicates this picture even further. It's analogous to the related concept of 'hormesis', which is a well known phenomena (and also the title of a subsection within McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things). These insights are important, because it doesn't appear that contemporary culture, and particularly the ruling ideology of market fundamentalism, has fully incorporated them. What prevails instead is the perverse logic of 'more is better', unmitigated by the subtle and paradoxical wisdom that 'less is sometimes more', which might be a better guide. Today the psychological phenomenon of 'hedonic adaptation', combined with blind instrumentalism, is feeding back into and exacerbating many of the dangerous trends we see today (including the LH capture of Western civilization and corresponding cultural decline). As described by Juna Gjata's friend, are we just making ourselves "rich and miserable"? 

The rat race. Is it possible to reduce the frenetic pace of modern life? We are daily bombarded with news about how modern lifestyles, with fast food, sleep deprivation, and lack of exercise, are making us ill and increasing the risk of early death. It is getting harder to imagine how paragons of longevity like James Lovelock were able to take daily walks! These systems lead to the ultimate irony, where people who love to stay healthy and enjoy outdoor activities like bike riding find they have no time to exercise (or even sleep) and instead spend the majority of their days in sedentary occupations, later dying due to complications of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in many places. How did we get here? How do we get off the treadmill? 

The need for a slower pace of life is foremost associated with the Slow Movement, which originated nearly thirty years ago in Italy before quickly expanding internationally. I will refer to this body of thought frequently here, while making numerous connections with the thought of Iain McGilchrist, who has expressed his support for it due to its broad consilience with the Gestalt of the right hemisphere. His thesis is outlined in two books (The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things), and it "articulates a kind of metatheory, a theory about theories, and that you can see the signature of a certain hemisphere (Gestalt) in a theory or worldview, and that with that knowledge you can instantly see its limitations or integration". It further describes how these two very different Gestalten influence our 'way of being', whether as individuals or as entire cultures and civilizations. This 'big idea' also helped produce a radical shift in my own Gestalt. Or, maybe it merely returned my views to their earlier form, though in a renewed and deeper way. (The particular path by which that happened, of which there are certainly many, may be less important than that it happened at all.) How we attend changes what it is we see. Xunzi said that when the mind is in accord with the Dao it is "empty, unified, and still". As McGilchrist remarked "I think this may sound negative, but 'resistance', and 'the negative', and 'the contrary', and 'the opposite' are often very important ways to go when we're trying to achieve a goal. What I would say has been important for me is mainly the things I don't do. I create open spaces. I live somewhere where it's very silent. But in this silence you hear the life around you: the trees, the hills, the cliffs, the waterfalls, the sea. Life comes to us if we create the space for it." Perhaps, at such moments, we can learn to see how life enables the discovery and unfolding of values that ‘evoke a response’, ‘call us to some end’, and ‘give meaning to life’. We could live less in the "map” and more on the "terrain" (we are the terrain, after all). We could open up the space for attention, subsume ourselves in complete absorption, and surrender to love. Not always, and not in all situations, but sometimes, and perhaps more often than occurs now. Love is a relationship. It is the foundation of value. "Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other" said Louis Lavelle. And as McGilchrist reminds us, attention is a profoundly moral act. It is how our world comes into being. Sigal Samuel wrote “The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoché) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process “decreation,” and explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Now digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy. Tristan Harris calls this “human downgrading”. 

There is 1) the terrain itself, 2) the map of the terrain, and 3) our perspectives on these, perhaps we could call those "metamaps". McGilchrist’s work belongs to this third category. Firstly, he observes that how we attend (whether that is to terrain or map) changes what it is we see (either the terrain or representation of it) and secondly, that there is an important role for both ways of attending. Concerning metacognition, Feng Youlan in his book A Short History of Chinese Philosophy quoted Aristotle on "thinking on thinking", and noted further that "when one thinks about the universe, one is thinking reflectively" since "the thinking and the thinker must be included in the totality". McGilchrist is "attending to attending", informed by his observation that there are two distinctly different ways of attending (to the terrain or to the map). While Youlan utilized his metatheory to note the recursive nature of self reflection and how that process informed the development of the various "maps" of Chinese philosophy, McGilchrist uses his metatheory to note the phenomenologically different worlds that are thus revealed to us, and how shifts between them have shaped the development of Western culture for the last several thousand years. These shifts have been correlated with, and causally implicated in, changes in societal health as well. The implication is that an understanding of McGilchrist's metatheory of attention, which illuminates the role of apprehensive theory in relation to comprehensive experience (something largely missing in discourse today), could be key to creating a paradigm shift in society, and grounding a narrative that leads away from nihilism and brings us back into equilibrium with Gaia. 

Donella Meadows observed that problems that emerge at one level can only be meaningfully addressed by appealing to a higher integrative level, an idea she made famous in her “Leverage Points” paper. We can't easily solve a problem by working exclusively within the same domain within which it emerged. Nor can we solve it by switching to another domain that is nonetheless at the same level as that of the problem. To provide an example, we can’t solve problems in ethics by creating more ethical frameworks. And similarly, we can't fix problems in regard to power by simply proposing other power structures. What we need are grounds by which to adjudicate between ostensibly equivalent frameworks and structures. Without such grounds, while we might initiate the dynamics of some new metastable regime, in order for it to persist for any length of time or develop above a certain baseline, the support of negative feedbacks are necessary. Where does the impetus for all these balancing feedbacks, this hard work and fine tuning, come from? It comes from the phenomenology of the affected agents (that's us). Phenomenology is at a level above both power and ethics, as it provides the explanatory toolkit by which we can understand these and address problems within either domain. It provides the grounds by which to adjudicate between ostensibly equivalent frameworks and structures. It would be dangerous to rely on the bare fact of reciprocal accountability to avoid failure modes if we don’t understand the phenomenology of the agents involved [see earlier AI discussion]. If it is to be effective at all, we need some understanding of the features of this higher level above the simple facts of power dynamics. If we don't have any understanding of this higher phenomenological level, then we can't use it to effectively adjudicate differences at the lower levels. And this is where McGilchirst’s ‘metatheory of attention’ comes in. It provides a perspective on the phenomenology of the affected agents who are actually directing the evolution of the system, and evaluating how we might ‘fine tune’ it to avoid a failure mode. Why should anyone care about that? To prevent a failure mode you need to know what you are looking at. You need to see it coming from as far away as possible. You need as much leverage as you can get. You need to operate at the highest level. From here we can see how alternative frameworks and structures, in both ethics and power, are rooted in evolutionary biology, and why these have the societal consequences we observe. From this vantage we can adjudicate between frameworks as to which is the more veridical and trustworthy, and we can (all importantly) be in the best position possible to guide their development and persistence. So any answer to a problem at the ethical framework level or the power structure level must be couched in the terms and language of the level above that. In this case it is the phenomenological level. Reciprocal accountability alone is metastable with the live possibility of failure, so we need resources that might allow us to better understand and mitigate that risk. In a sense, the problem really isn't the frameworks, it is the phenomenology. And that explains McGilchrist's hesitancy to provide a list of "what to do" at the framework or engineering level, because it tends to presuppose the wrong level of engagement. Our "what to do" answers must invoke and be made entirely in reference to the phenomenology, which is the relevant criteria. 

John Ehrenfeld once asked the members of a discussion group on McGilchrist that both he and I were in, "How do we become more LH or RH? Why are we LH one day and RH the next?" To answer this question we should reflect that McGilchrist is trying to help us, his readers, first recognize when we become more LH in our thinking. Because if we can recognize when this happens, then we can reflect on whatever context it was that brought us to that point. And with this insight we can then better equilibrate ourselves before we 'fall into the abyss' of LH capture. Elsewhere, McGilchrist has made the general observation that whenever our prime value is that of control (as is the case when administering an empire) the voice of the RH becomes fainter. He tends to resist providing a list of "what to do", preferring instead to describe "how we attend". It is as if his assumption is that if can simply change how we attend, then what it is we are to do would, in some sense, become immediately obvious and no such list would be necessary to begin with (Chanism describes sudden enlightenment in this way). As he said recently, "If we understood the world in all its awe-inspiring complexity, then a lot of things would happen differently because so much of what's wrong is due to simple hubris." Feng Youlan also noted that "Zhuangzi solved the original problem of the early Taoists simply by abolishing it. This is really the philosophical way of solving problems. Philosophy gives no information about matters of fact, and so cannot solve any problem in a concrete and physical way. It cannot, for example, help man either to gain longevity or defy death, nor can it help him to gain riches and avoid poverty. What it can do, however, is to give man a point of view, from which he can see that life is no more than death and loss is equal to gain. From the 'practical' point of view, philosophy is useless, yet it can give us a point of view which is very useful. To use an expression of the Zhuangzi, this is the usefulness of the useless." But to the degree that McGilchrist has explicitly mentioned practical things we might do, these have involved (1) resisting the imposition of excessive control in all areas of life and (2) bringing back a love for the arts and humanities and the worlds they open up to us, something he considers essential to a healthy society. In any event, his advice always centers around fostering that broad and sustained form of RH attention that is capable of changing what it is we see, and hence what it is we do, which in turn influences what we see. Feedback processes are in play.

The very last of the 20 "headline differences" between the hemispheres that McGilchrist gives in the introduction to TMWT is "The LH is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic." Contemporary culture, captured by the LH and infused with the rhetoric of positivity and optimism, has become rather psychologically toxic. And it is unreasonably biased against doubt and the vulnerability that is associated with a slightly more pessimistic or melancholic disposition. But there's something very cathartic, and indeed authentic, about a keen sensitivity to ephemerality in all things, and it's key to understanding Japanese aesthetics as well (for example, mononoaware). McGilchrist famously calls himself a "hopeful pessimist", a sentiment that is entirely consistent with what he's written. This concept of the "pessimistic right hemisphere" harkens back to the overcast, cloudy, concealed and hidden aspect of yin in the Taoist cosmology. Laozi wrote "the best (person) is like water." To which Wing Tsit-Chan in his Source Book in Chinese Philosophy commented "water, the female, and the infant are Laozi's famous symbols of Tao." Laozi is praising the yin aspects of the yin and yang, a prominent organizing principle in Chinese dialectical monism, just as McGilchrist praises the RH form of attention that is deployed by the brain. The comparison here is not coincidental. Do these ideas have a relevance to the development of the Slow Movement?

Creating a paradigm shift?

Broadly speaking, the Slow Movement could be thought of as one of many nascent, local manifestations of the more general paradigm shift that McGilchrist is trying to effect. How we might support such a paradigm shift? Here are a few quotes to start us off with as begin our examination of that question. McGilchrist: "How we attend changes what it is we see." William James: "Everything is process and change." 

Taking these as our guides, to create a paradigm shift we would need to learn how to see everything as playing some kind of active role in influencing how we attend. That is to say, our way of attending is enacted within our conscious choices, and it also extends into the physical environment. McGilchrist has noted how matter and consciousness can be thought of using the analogy of water and ice, a single unity with more than one 'aspect'. Similarly, C.S. Peirce said that matter "is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws". The social and cultural structures thus affected are therefore both organizational and material in nature. Regarding the organizational structure, McGilchrist described how evolution saw fit to divide the brain, instantiating opponent processing with its two very different ways of attending, to keep the organism alive and connected to its embedded context. John Vervaeke described why this dynamic is important: 

"You can make a good case for left and right hemispheres. The left is for well defined, the right is for ill-defined and they’re doing opponent processing. The point I want to make is you’ve got this complex dynamic of opponent processing systems that are pushing and pulling on each other. They are causally interpenetrating, interrelated. We don't do most of our problem solving as individuals, but as collectives. Democracy is a form of collective intelligence or distributed cognition. It is the style of governance that gives us opponent processing [aka reciprocal accountability]. You and I may have opposite biases, but we cooperate in the shared understanding that the best way I can correct myself is by looking through your eyes, and the best way you can correct yourself is by looking through my eyes. We don't come to a final agreement. Democracy is constantly evolving and self-correcting. Today we have abandoned opponent processing for adversarial processing, in which one side has determined that its bias should be absolutely triumphant and destroy the other side. I talk about an “ecology of practices” because there is no “panacea practice”. Every practice has strengths, but it also has complementary weaknesses. We should be offering the world opponent processing situated within a hermeneutics of beauty, building friendship and fellowship, rather than adversarial processing situated in a hermeneutics of suspicion that only increases tribalism."

Currently many of our institutional practices align with the LH way of attending. We need to incorporate more practices that reflect a RH way of attending. For a recent example, see Erica Thompson's approach to "plausible models". Our models embody different ways of thinking, and can enter into a positive feedback loop that affects how we think about the future. As she said "We don’t want to know that by making more models, and increasingly similar models, that we will get the same answer again and again. What we want to know is that no ‘plausible model’ could give a different answer." Greater engagement with her concept of plausible models would likely go a long way toward re-establishing a healthier LH/RH balance.

But in the physical world of "inveterate habits" around us, how can we recognize the dialectical tension of opponent processing, between dividing and uniting? “Vital materialism” reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities. Matter, as an active force, is co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and human life and experience. 

The design of the built environment, our tools, those systems of frictions that we interact with and through daily, all embody a similar capacity for agency, and can recapitulate the same processes. Kevin Kelly: "The idea that we choose the valence of technology’s charge is very appealing to our egos, but technology comes with biases and autonomy." Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Neil Postman: "We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.” Hassenzahl and Laschke said, "With an aesthetic of convenience, you will never instill change. What you need rather, is an aesthetic of friction." Like McGilchrist's Gestalt shift, Hassenzahl and Laschke are creating a figure-ground shift in emphasizing the value of friction over the blind pursuit of the frictionless. In his 2016 article, Tristan Harris wrote: "Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices." Kevin Roose: "Friction is just another word for “effort,” and it’s what makes us capable of critical thought and self-reflection." McGilchrist again: "Without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being. You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. Things are not isolated by resistance, but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance." 

Wendy Wood has noted that it is possible to decrease friction to build good habits, and increase friction to dismantle bad habits. As she said,  "Anything you can do to make something easier and reduce the friction will make it more likely that people do it. Anything that increases the friction will make it less likely. (Not impossible, but much less likely.) We need to make the consequences of behavior part of our experience in order to factor them into the economy." Today we are designing the world for greater alienation and disembodied experiences. But we could leverage 'positive friction' and 'enabling constraints' to help restore equilibrium, just as surely as the disruption of these has contributed to LH capture today. The architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander once said: “In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide.” His concept of a "feel for the whole" captured how the act of designing the structure of our ecosystem also shapes the quality of social interactions and the mental health of society itself. Tanzil Shafique also noted that “the way we build and organize our cities can help or hinder social connection". The built environment can either enable or constrain potential interaction. Winston Churchill, echoing McLuhan above, observed that "we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us". Architects and planners produce urban landscapes that influence our mental landscape. If these are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness, then design can be an important tool in response to it. 

There's a living ecology of frictions, both material and immaterial, running through our minds, our cultural institutions, and our built environment and artifacts. Artificial intelligence is increasing relevant in this context as well (see "artificial intelligence" section of this article.) If we learn how to view these processes in their essential 'oppositional complementarity', and understand the generative capacity inherent to such a relationship, maybe we could effect a paradigm shift. We could slow down and live a healthier, more enriching life, without compromising on the things we value most. We could avoid an ironic fate. System transformation can be a bottom up and piecemeal process of slowly accumulating changes until a critical threshold is reached, and at that point a ‘phase transition’ occurs: the paradigm shifts. If we can see that there's a fundamental Heraclitean tension everywhere, one that we can engage with (and leverage), then we might see many opportunities to take the small steps that could culminate in a flourishing world. To be sure, as Jonathan Rowson notes, "the left hemisphere is ultimately unable to re-present schematically what is fully present to experience" (asymmetry with RH), and that is why there are two ways of attending to begin with, or as he put it, this is "the recognition that reality is invariably either/or and both/and". This doesn’t mean we should give up 'schematizing' all together as a completely hopeless pursuit. Not at all. Rather, it means we must recognize the limitations inherent to this mode of thinking while still striving to make incremental improvements to our current representations. This is the proper role of the LH, wherein it fulfills its function in service to the RH as an 'emissary’. 

We can integrate the hemisphere hypothesis into the development of axiological design, where value and ethics are primary and engineering is secondary. This is the inverse of nihilistic design, per Zak Stein. Under a paradigm of nihilistic design, technology can all too easily enter into a positive feedback loop with the left hemisphere and its quest for control and manipulation. That has implications for our attention, and what we see (or what we fail to see). Design invariably both embodies and leverages a sort of tension that is capable of shifting our attention (attention and tension are related words; attention is from ad "to, toward" + tendere "stretch"). If we as individuals recognize the very real relationships between design, attention, and value, perhaps we can be in a better position to wake up as a society. Jim Rutt recently spoke with Forrest Landry about what he considers to be the catastrophic risk of accelerating AI development. His argument is very interesting, and I won’t pretend to understand it well enough to accurately summarize here, so listen to it (or read the transcript). I’ll reproduce the conclusion of their conversation. Below that I note the apparent agreement between Landry, Zak Stein, and Iain McGilchrist concerning why this risk exists and what we can do to address it: 

Forrest Landry: “I find myself ending up being an advocate of appropriate use of technology, neither too much, nor too little… The only way to basically prevent [an existential catastrophe] from happening is to not play the game to start with. It’s like that old movie (WarGames, 1983). How do you win thermonuclear war? You don’t play. How do we get there? I think we need a non-transactional way of making choices in the world. Take the incentives out. Make it so that the ways in which we’re thinking about how we make choices at the level of communities are not dominated just by business. We don’t have separation between business and governance the same way we do between church and state. The perverse incentives are part of the reason why we keep ending up with categories of existential risks like this. If we’re looking at creating a meaningful basis for life, that essentially goes beyond the perverse incentives and addresses these kinds of concerns, people need to understand what’s actually going on. So in the long term, I’d love to see that get looked at, and that’s part of the reason why I work at things like Ephemeral Group Process (EGP), governance models, community design, and so on and so forth. …Nature doesn’t compromise. None of this is negotiable.” 

Jim Rutt: “And this is Robin Hansen’s “great filter” answer to the Fermi paradox. There’s two answers to the Fermi paradox. One is the ‘past great filter’, which is that it’s really hard to have gotten as far as we’ve gotten. Was it DNA? The prokaryotic cell? Multicellularity? The neuron? It could have been a bunch of things which had to happen before we got here. And then the other side of it is well, maybe it’s not that hard to get to where we are, but it’s really hard to survive much longer. This is the ‘future great filter’. Robin is of the view that probably the math says it’s more likely the ‘future great filter’, not the ‘past great filter’.” 

Forrest Landry: “Regardless, if it’s the past great filter, then we’re undervaluing life. If it’s the future great filter, then we need to get our act together right now so that we can continue to value life. Whatever we think about the Fermi paradox, the necessity of our action is clear.” 

Recall that in October Iain McGilchrist addressed the AI Word Summit, saying “The problem with every step that increases the reach of human power is it will sooner or later be used for evil ends, and once a pernicious regime reaches a certain level it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it. AI is there to make things happen, to give us control, but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how. I’m not talking here about an apocalyptic future. I’m talking about apocalypse now. We’re already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.” In so many words, Landry effectively said in this podcast with Rutt the same message that McGilchrist delivered there. McGilchrist’s metatheoretical approach for balancing the narrow, ambitious instrumentalism of the left hemisphere, which is the form of AGI that Landry describes, with the values and restraint of the right hemisphere can be usefully applied to his work. Also recall that Zak Stein closed his article “Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design” with the sentence “The dangerous reign of nihilistic design must end if our civilization is not to.” Nihilistic design ends in nihilism. Axiological design, which is the appropriate technology Landry advocates, recognizes the existential importance of context sensitive limitations applied to technology and operating within culture. AI value alignment means programming biases into AI that will disrupt business as usual, because BAU is most definitely not aligned with human values. Having human values means being biased in making certain decisions - biased in ways that help people, and don’t hurt them, biased in ways that create healthy ecosystems, not degraded ecosystems. The talk of “removing bias” from AI is a codeword for nihilistic design that counteracts the need for value alignment. And that sort of talk will not disrupt business as usual, but only exacerbate existing problems. BAU has already been on an accelerating path to greater levels of extraction and exploitation. Amplifying that trend may be irrecoverable. 

Shoshana Zuboff described the “blind by design” approach. Is it inevitable that a blind culture would design blindness into everything else? In her paper "Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?" (2022) she writes that while businesses “admit that blindness by design is incompatible with any reasonable construction of responsible stewardship… executives and allies defend blindness by design as the protection of free speech, another rhetorical sleight of hand that aims to distract lawmakers and the public from noticing the facts.” This sleight of hand is accomplished by erasing the nuance required to balance the benefits of freedom and the benefits of constraint against each other. Instead we are presented with a mutually exclusive choice. That’s the trap. And it works because the LH is divorced from reality, simply unable to see nuance, and its only value is that of power. It will fall for this false choice every time. An entire culture captured by the LH is thus prevented from imposing common sense rules and regulations to guard against abuse.

Addressing Multipolar traps

I’m going to make an extended commentary on something Daniel Schmachtenberger said in his recent conversation with Nate Hagens, and in doing so I will draw on the work of several other thinkers. Here’s the portion of the conversation I will address: 

“Human intelligence unbound by wisdom, and in the pursuit of narrow goals, it is fair to say, is the underlying generative dynamic of the growth imperative of the superorganism [Hagen’s term for what Schmachtenberger elsewhere called “Moloch”] and this metacrisis. The growth in consumption, waste, technology, and the promotion of the same, are all epiphenomena, a second order effect of that. It has created all the technologies: the industrial tech, the agricultural tech, the digital tech, the nuclear weapons, the energy harvesting… all of it. That intelligence has created all those things. What everyone is pursuing is not the growth of the whole system. They're just individually pursuing their own narrow goals. The pursuit of AGI to maximize recursive intelligence is partly the result of this competitive race, and partly the result of a set of biases. Those who are more focused on the opportunity than the risk end up being the ones who rush ahead. People who don't think AGI will kill everything try to build AGI because they think it will solve everything. It's a combination of 'naive progress optimism', all of the various sources of motivated reasoning, the legal obligation for profit maximization, the inherent externalization of liability and centralization of profit, and the avoidance of regulation because nations want economic growth to grow their militaries and strengthen geopolitical alliances. There are layers and layers of multipolar traps driving the optimization of near-term narrow interests.”

His use of the term “multipolar traps” (otherwise called the tragedy of the commons, a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma) refers to a basic coordination problem affecting global society. Because it is a coordination problem, any attempt that is initiated by one player to simply make business-as-usual (BAU) too politically or financially expensive is essentially too superficial of a solution to actually work. All players must act together at the same time. Multipolar traps help to explain why regulatory capture is so pervasive, and it is the reason why Pigouvian taxation tends to gain little to no actual traction. (Carbon taxes have attempted to avoid this coordination problem with “border adjustments”, but there are other contextual problems for that approach.) As Schmachtenberger noted “nations want economic growth to grow their militaries and strengthen geopolitical alliances”. So if any single nation makes BAU too expensive, then it will almost certainly be out-competed or dominated by the other players. And because this is a multiscalar phenomenon, we can see its operation not just in international affairs, but anywhere that competitive relationships play out. Conversely, where there is less competition, these dynamics exert less influence over decision making (thankfully). 

The notion of competition and competitive dynamics is central here. It requires a focused, narrow, predictive, model making capacity of intelligence in service of goal achievement. Schmachtenberger correctly associates this with McGilchrist’s left hemisphere way of attending, and he insightfully recognizes how this can lead to multipolar traps. Arran Gare drew another inference: “Unless they are checked… people with greater left hemisphere dominance are likely to be more successful than people with healthy brains. With their manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes, they become successful parasites on others and on public institutions. The most problematic and damaging are those who strive for power." On Gare's behalf, I must apologize to all the non-human parasites out there, who at least have a legitimate excuse for their behavior. 

Echoing Gare, Schmachtenberger said: “Intelligence unbound by wisdom, and in the pursuit of narrow goals, it is fair to say, is the underlying generative dynamic of the growth imperative”. The main characteristic of this way of thinking is that it is always done in reference to a narrowly conceived notion of self, and it is motivated by concerns in reference to that, such as ambition and fear. Schmachtenberger also said “those who are more focused on the opportunity than the risk end up being the ones who rush ahead”. We are now in a position where we can say something about this opportunity that they seek. It is the opportunity to exercise more power and control within a competitive arena, motivated primarily by their self interest. 

Gare was right, such people must be checked and held accountable, but efforts to do this haven’t succeeded due to multipolar traps that lead to a “race to the bottom”. And so now we must address these dynamics. Elinor Ostrom’s life work was attempting to understand how the coordination problem can be addressed. She found that multipolar traps exist wherever there are deficits in the balancing feedbacks of communication and reciprocity necessary for trust within a coherent, fully integrated system. I suspect that these deficits also lead to greater fear and suspicion, and allow those “parasites” to which Gare referred to seize control and shift overall system dynamics. We’ve seen this many times in the decline of empires and the rise of fascist leaders. The toxic combination of narrow ambition, fear, mistrust, and suspicion inevitably exacerbates a “left hemisphere insurrection”, or as Schmachtenberger calls it, the “emissary intelligence function”, and consequently the “master wisdom function” retreats further from view. Power and control becomes the dominant value of nations, and unaccountable surveillance increases. I could go on to describe the form and function of dystopian dynamics, but this is tangential to the main point, and besides others have done this better and at greater length elsewhere. 

So back to the main point, as McGilchrist described, this leads to a “left hemisphere insurrection” and the concomitant “unmaking of the world”. I described some of the deficits that produce it, so it should be clear that part of the solution will involve shifting the dominant value that drives international politics away from power and toward responsiveness, and that means more communication and trust. Elinor Ostrom’s work on design principles for collective self-governance addresses how these healthy dynamics can be established. Helena Norber-Hodge has done some related work. In short, Ostrom showed that where natural resources are jointly managed by their users, and where key management decisions are made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible, outcomes for the system as a whole are much better. McGilchrist’s ‘metatheory of attention’ both immensely strengthens and places Ostrom’s principles on a firm foundation. It reinforces her insight concerning the importance of wise direct engagement within the world, as embodied partners in creation. The holistic system itself can also be seen to include many leverage points for the realization of healthy social and economic dynamics, a topic Donella Meadows described. 

As was mentioned earlier, no methodology will be sufficient. Everything must ultimately be in deference to the RH and its ability to presence to reality. The self-undermining methodology of Peirce’s pragmatism was intended to keep managers humble in the face of reality and skeptical of their own models, methods, and logic. Ostrom’s methodology is explicitly designed to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to be responsive, to presence to the embodied systems that they manage, to stay “as close as possible”. And this is why the values of communication, trust, and responsiveness (values of the RH) are elevated above sheer power and control (values of the LH). Whenever power and control come to dominate system dynamics it can easily be viewed as the consequence of a breakdown of trust, communication, and responsiveness, the fragmentation of social systems, and the loss of connection and relatedness. Overall, that is an insurrection of the sort McGilchrist describes. 

[Side note: There is a common (and superficial) misreading that should be addressed. Some people read the words “left” and “right” and then get the initial impression that “McGilchrist insists that everything’s binary”. So if it helps at all, he’s Daoist. Think of Daoist philosophy. In Daoism, the binary concepts (Taiji) emerge from a deeper nonbinary reality (Wuji). Part of McGilchrist’s project can be seen as explaining that we all have access to the deeper nonbinary world, but we get confused with binary thinking. It should be clear that, in order to talk about binary thinking one must make reference to it, and there’s going to be a lot of discussion of paradox as well. At any rate, this also helps to explain why McGilchrist is a great foundation for Elinor Ostrom. She, like him, also eschewed the imposition of binary thinking, and strongly advocated for understanding our embodied reality.] 

In her Hayek Lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs you can see Ostrom's focus is on really presencing to each unique situation and resisting the temptation to over-generalize: “What are some of the challenges that we face in order to sustain the health of diverse commons? The first is overcoming what I call the ‘panacea trap’: a very large number of policy makers and policy articles talk about the ‘best way’ of doing something. People used to think that if ‘the market’ wasn't the best way it meant that ‘the government’ was the best way. We need to get away from thinking in these very broad terms that don't give us the specific detail that is needed to really know what we're talking about.  We need to recognize that the systems that actually have worked in practice fit the diversity of ecological conditions and social systems that exist. People want to make me argue that community is always the best. I won't step into that trap! There are certainly very strong places where people can self-organize. But it's not the best. Just like government isn't the best. Just like the market is not the best. Not all resources should be privately owned or government owned. That was Garrett Hardin’s conclusion, and it’s repeated in many textbooks.”

Cross-cultural studies

How are McGilchrist's books and ideas received outside the Anglophone world? We have seen that, within at least some parts of Western cultures, there's a recognition of our self-inflicted social and environmental predicament. And for those familiar with McGilchrist, the proximal causes of this situation do appear to align with the left hemisphere way of thinking. Living in a nihilistic culture populated by people displaying schizotypal traits, we are constantly reminded of this state of affairs. But as we travel further from the epicenter of Western culture and into less assimilated cultures, the conditions may become markedly different, and so too might the reception and application of the hemisphere hypothesis. People who are not overly reductive and instrumental in their thinking, who recognize values and a sense of the sacred, and live in a culture that has retained its customs and traditions, may be less interested in a hypothesis that tries to explain at long length what they already intuitively understand. For example, in Japan Shinto beliefs are very animistic, even panpsychic, and there are many other features that place the culture more toward the RH when compared to Western civilization. But cultures do change, and knowledge, beliefs, and lifestyles with it. So the primary relevance of McGilchrist's thought might be in serving as a bulwark against colonialism (with regard to indigenous peoples), homogenization, and assimilation by the contemporary West. In short, in the context of a healthy culture, the hemisphere hypothesis can serve as an evidence-based defense for non-Western ways of being, an important part of any cultural "immune system". But it's hard to know how such ideas have been received internationally without actually being a part of these other cultures. Tentative search results for イアン・マクギルクリスト (Iain McGilchrist's name in Japanese katakana) on my Internet browser were not encouraging, though that may simply reflect my browser's regional settings. These are still the early days for this sort of research. Cross-cultural studies could help to identify local analogues of the hypothesis, as well as how those analogues might have influenced how people understand themselves, their place in the world, and their future.