- Matsuo Basho
"We don't have values because we are alive, but life is necessary because there are values." - McGilchrist (paraphrasing Thomas Nagel)
Why does McGilchrist place so much emphasis on the need to “reconceive who we are”? Does he emphasize “right thought” (or attention) over “right action”? In The Matter With Things, he describes what he considers to be one of his main contributions: “When faced with two differing accounts of the world, we can tell from the characteristic ‘imprint’ of either hemisphere on each account which is more likely to be reliable. Without, of course, wishing to discount either of them altogether, we can make a shrewd assessment of which we ought to prefer. …If I am right, this is a genuine advance in philosophy.” …It seems to me that re-conception and re-engagement need not be mutually exclusive, but can be mutually reinforcing, in the sense that thoughts and actions are not separate. He quoted Whitehead in this vein, who wrote "As we think, we live."
Kevin Anderson recently said: “Action is really what we need, and quite what colors the action I think is personal to you, your community, and your local circumstances. So I don't think it's appropriate for someone like me to say, you should do this or you should do that.” In trying to respond to the question "What do I personally do to introduce [the account we ought to prefer] more into my life?" I think it’s our responsibility to make a similar sort of ‘shrewd assessment’ for how we should engage with the world, given our unique contexts. And while the LH might prefer suggesting specific rules and prescribed actions to align us with the RH, and though these can no doubt be very useful at times, the RH is more concerned with the larger Gestalt effect thus produced, than with any of the practices themselves, when viewed in isolation. It’s that RH capacity for Gestalt perception, and the ability to presence to the world (the terrain), that provides a ‘standard’ more reliable than any standard, and the insight into which of any two paths is more veridical. In the same way, I think this is how we are going to be able to tell which, of any two or more practices, is going to be the more capable of reinforcing the right hemisphere.
From an article McGilchrist wrote in 1995, reviewing the work of Louis Sass: “Schizophrenia… might be better rendered as ‘shattered mind’. Indeed, the word ‘shattered’ picks up well one of the condition’s cardinal features: the loss of the faculty of seeing things as a whole – the loss, to use the old psychological term, of the Gestalt…” Among contemporary writers, I think it was perhaps Sass who exerted the greatest influence on McGilchrist.
The McGilchrist Key
"Yes, a key can lie for ever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for." - Ludwig Wittgenstein (October 24, 1946)
"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." - McGilchrist
"Learn the backward step..." - Dogen
To quickly summarize a few of the ideas we've looked at, we have the "hemisphere hypothesis" (via "opponent process theory"), the notion of "left hemisphere capture/ insurrection" (cf. "controlled opposition"), the "McGilchrist Manoeuvre" and the "McGilchrist Wager", all of which are fairly well known. To this short list of glossary terms I've suggested the "McGilchrist Paradox", a "Multiscalar Interpretation" of the hypothesis, "stereoscopic thought", the "McGilchrist Commision", "McGilchrist's Bridge Laws" (see below), and the "McGilchrist Invitation" (see below). Yet another potentially useful shorthand label we might introduce is the "McGilchrist Key" (though the more general sounding label "decision key" or "skeleton key", or perhaps "McGilchrist compass" may be better). I'm taking a cue from the 'dichotomous keys' used in phylogenetics, as well as the epigraph to the Introduction of The Matter with Things by Wittgenstein. But this is actually an idea we've already heard before, I just don't think we have assigned any shorthand label for it yet. (But do let me know if I'm overlooking one that's already circulating out there.)
As one writer put it, the hemisphere hypothesis is "a kind of metatheory, a theory about theories, and that you can see the signature (hallmark, imprint, etc.) of a certain hemisphere in a theory or worldview", and so with that knowledge you can see "which is more likely to be reliable". It follows then that "without wishing to discount either of them altogether, we can make a shrewd assessment of which we ought to prefer" (McGilchrist). In other words, "we can now make more weighted decisions about which, of any two paths, is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful." This draws upon Marcel Kinsbourne's neurological application of "opponent process theory", as McGilchrist describes in a subsection of The Master and His Emissary subtitled "The Importance of Being Two". An implication of that theory is that one way to strengthen the desired process is by inhibiting the opposing process of the pair, generally through the strategic addition or removal of friction from the system (see Wendy Wood, Zak Stein's axiological design, etc.). This is an indirect approach toward goal achievement, and in that regard similar to wuwei.
Take the example of war and peace. First we can recognize that we have a choice between these opposed goals. Which do we want to achieve? Peace? Now apply opponent process theory. In doing so, we might seek to inhibit the processes behind the tendency to war-making. By inhibiting the conditions for war, the assumption is that the conditions for peace are no longer opposed. (Peace being the primary condition of which war is a limit case.) Thus peace is permitted. The theory suggests that, rather than trying to make peace happen by active pro-peace interventions, in most cases we would probably do better by trying to inhibit whatever it is that makes war more likely. (The syzygy of a great attractor and repeller, or more colloquially the "carrot and stick") Is there any difference between these approaches in actual practice? I think so. It rests on our ability to understand the problem or predicament we are faced with. And it's not unlike the difference between the cataphatic and the apophatic.
The McGilchrist Key thus mediates the tense space between two hemispheres with opposing modes of attention. It permits us to see the choice implicit within the opposition, where before we may not have recognized any (particularly the case when captured by the LH). And, consistent with the opponent process theory of Marcel Kinsbourne, once one sees the implicit choice, one way to strengthen the reliable path is by inhibiting the opposing process of the pair. Inhibitory action achieves its desired end via permissive rather than intentionally coercive action. Thus the conditions for flourishing arise in a very wuwei manner. By guiding us along more veridical paths in this way, the potential for transformation is unlocked (RH liberation from LH capture). This is a practical application of the hypothesis for catalyzing a shift away from the world of the LH and towards that of the RH, whether that shift occurs at a collective or an individual scale. I think exploring the implications of this decision key has helped sustain a shift in my own Gestalt. Or maybe it has merely returned it to something of its earlier form, though in a renewed and deeper way.
To put this in the context of an individual who is struggling with the expression of LH traits (such as difficulty keeping the "big picture" in mind, displaying an overly narrow focus that correspondingly reduces the salience of important conspecifics with whom one is intimately and emotionally interconnected, and their needs; difficulty prioritizing, triaging, and completing tasks, resulting in perseveration, trouble transitioning and "moving on" to something new, such that one can't easily just "get in, get it done, and get out"), then we can do something about this. By understanding how opponent process theory undergirds the hemisphere hypothesis, seeing the choice implicit in the opposition between these complementary hemispheres, preferencing the more reliable option in any choice, and inhibiting those processes that are opposed to the more reliable choice, we can better realize the desired process. This is a transformation from the expression of choices that reinforce LH traits and the limit cases to which they tend and toward the primary conditions whose expression is thereby permitted (without any coercive measures taken).
McGilchrist's Bridge Laws
"The bridge law objection" may be a perennial concern of reductive physicalism. In the spirit of Zeno’s Paradox, it concerns how far we should "decompose the brain," from the macro-structure of hemispheres, all the way down to the synapses and still further to the ‘computations’ themselves, before we are satisfied with an explanation. There's no predetermined limit for how far we might go when in search of the ‘locus’ of consciousness. It all depends on how committed/ invested one is in a mechanistic model. Essentially this is a search for a positive description (via positiva) of 'what-it-is' that engenders the mode of attention being described. Michael Spezio wrote, "Bridge laws perhaps are best understood as the theoretical-philosophical theories, maybe even one’s scholarly commitments, about how measured signals from the brain and the rest of the body (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance, pupil size) convey information about the processes involved in a given cognitive mode or task or experience." For someone with Spezio’s theoretical-philosophical commitments, the literature cited by McGilchrist, which includes a lot of dramatic lesion-deficit studies, is an unsatisfying negative description (via negativa). However positive and negative descriptions are to some extent simply inverse approaches, but with asymmetric implications for higher level gestalt perception versus the flat ontology of eliminative materialism. For example, an inordinate overemphasis on via positiva approaches might dispose one to runaway reductionism (as described above). Whereas McGilchrist’s theory about the higher level structure of the brain (not Spezio's minutiae of "neural encoding") allows for via negativa explanations and relies on a more process oriented philosophy. This suggests a possible way to describe what might be called "McGilchrist's bridge laws" between the science and the humanities. Why is this important? McGilchrist remarked earlier:
"One of the things that I notice is that very few people in the neuroscience world have said that the neuroscience that's in either The Master and his Emissary or in The Matter with Things (where it's more extensive) is wrong. A number of people have said, 'As far as the science goes, this is good. We’re on your side. But, then you go and apply it to the lives of people in the world.' And on the other hand, there are philosophers who understand what I'm saying about the world, and about what a human being is, and they say, 'Well, I don't know about the science. Of course, it's very interesting, but wouldn't it stand up on its own without the science?' So you've got these two factions that I'm trying to bring together, each in their way saying, 'Well, yes, the bit that's in our realm is okay, but why have these two together?' One of the things that I'm hoping for is that there will be a revolution in the way we think, an expansion of vision in the sciences and in the humanities that will enable each of them to see the value of the other. And one of the messages I'm trying to get across is the need for science and the humanities to come together again. ...The advantage of linking them is that this alerts you to things that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily think of."
Concerning cosmological descriptions, the "both/and" approach is probably the nearest we'll get. There's several good reasons for that. First of all, the universe embodies paradoxical qualities, and so opposing descriptions can be equally illuminating. Secondly and more fundamentally, as McGilchrist importantly noted, "we can't, with the kind of cognition that we have now, answer this with [any] proper model". (Fun fact: For those familiar with other logic systems, these points correspond to the seventh step of Jaina seven-valued logic: "it is, it is not, and it is indescribable".) The cosmos can be metaphorically described as an "iterative process" of infinite complexification, or in other words, as a fractal of "spirals, within spirals, within spirals" and so on. There's some great animations of fractals showing how the infinite repetition of patterns reveals limitless potential for novelty. What we see is often only limited by the generating process and our scale of resolution. And this is also why "relations precede relata" - every atom is decomposable into particle relations, which further decompose into particle relations, and on and on, so far as we can tell. There's no limit there either.
Which begs the question concerning time: was there ever really a beginning in this cosmology? I don't think we can define a beginning or end, but perhaps more important than that is the recognition of directionality, a telos that is from a certain view cyclic, but from another also open and without end. So in short, I think the universe never fully returns to its initial state, just as zooming into a complex fractal at ever increasing levels of resolution may yield similar looking patterns, but in context these are never exactly the same. We can recognize a kind of "family resemblance" among physical and historical cycles, and all manner of harmonic oscillations throughout the world, but each turn of the wheel leaves an indelible impression on the whole. Each moment is unique and, at the same time, part of the eternal whole. That's a very Heraclitean statement.
I'm not sure what good these insights may be "in real life", other than to say that the fractal metaphor connects very well with McGilchrist's Wager concerning our role in the development of the whole. It should at least cause us to doubt those who suggest the sort of fatalistic outlook of physical determinism. And it undermines popular ideas of symmetry, given the past and the future are not perfectly symmetrical but reveal an ever-unfolding telos. The implications, which I'd suggest fall more or less right out of that RH Gestalt described by McGilchrist, are actually far reaching. Here's a few lines from The Matter with Things (emphasis is mine):
Consider a simple recursive fractal that can be iterated infinitely. Because it is very simple, it looks the same at all levels of resolution. A short description of it might be: When viewed with a short focal length and from the top, we see a circle. Turn it on its side, and the spiral is revealed. Zoom into the spiral, and another spiral is seen traveling along the length of the first. Zoom into that spiral, and yet another spiral is revealed. And on, and on. This is a simple, repeating, scale invariant pattern. The appearance of an "eternal return" that we see when viewing it from the top may be more an artefact of a particular form of attention, than a characteristic of the universe itself. Fractals appear throughout the natural world with surprising regularity. And if we move on to a fractal like the "Mandelbrot set", which is actually defined by a very simple equation, we see that such order can reveal infinite complexity. The kintsugi vessel is repeatedly broken and repaired. Eventually it is solid gold, but even that can be broken and repaired with still more exquisite materials.
The sort of "open individualism" viewpoint expressed in "The Egg" is apparently also shared by both Schrödinger (who in his book What is Life? quoted from the Upanishads) and Alan Watts, and so in that regard it may not be too distant from McGilchrist either. And it also reminds me of the film adaptation of David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas. There are two lines in that movie that I think are central to understanding its themes, and illustrate the connection here. The first: "Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others", which echoes the notion within Buddhism of dependent origination. And the second: "To be is to be perceived. And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other." This is the well known Latin phrase "Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived), explored by the philosophers George Berkley and later by G.E. Moore. (But I think the more general idea could equally apply to Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, as described in Helgoland.) Taken together, the lines express the coinciding 'attributes of the infinite', on the one hand, and 'virtues of the finite', on the other. Just as John Donne linked man with mankind: "No man is an island entire of itself; ...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." ...McGilchrist recently said, in conversation, "I would say it's perfectly possible for God to, perhaps, be both unchanging and in process. There are even ways in which I could visualize this helpfully for somebody. For example, there are on the Internet images of a 'full circle' which begins to unfold, and then the parts break up and change. The circle with all its beauty is there all the time, but within this, almost fractally, things are being generated. So it's ever generative, without that in some sense spoiling its integrity."
As we know, the LH is the world of maps, scaffolds, and representations of all sorts in general. Whereas the RH is the terrain. Of course, the terrain includes everything in it, even the maps and scaffolds that we leave scattered about. For the very reason that the terrain is much more than just the maps we make, the hemisphere that corresponds to it is able to see the limitations of such representational thinking. If we talk about the un-word (and there are good reasons for doing so) then we will inevitably contradict ourselves. It cannot be helped. Complementary opposition is baked into the terrain of life and our very biology. This makes McGilchrist's work in Part III of his book difficult. To help guide us along the way he references many different scaffolds, from many different myths and wisdom traditions. Each provides a slightly different perspective on the same terrain. Though each is inadequate to be sure, he is suggesting that the more "veridical" scaffolds will be those that more faithfully reflect the signature features of the terrain, and by extension, the RH. McGilchrist describes God as both immanent and transcendent, "both immediately knowable and completely unknowable at the same time":
“The divine is widely held in many cultures to be transcendent (beyond the world) and undivided, yet at the same time immanent (in the world) and present in all things. As Lord Krishna says to Arjuna of the wise man: ‘When he sees me in all and he sees all in me, then I never leave him and he never leaves me’: those ‘with spiritual vision … worship me as One and as Many, because they see that all is in me'. […] …We need union, but we need that to be the union of division with union.”
 |
| Adapted from Tom Morgan |
“What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word. This is no doubt why in every great tradition of thought – and perhaps beyond that, in every language of every people – there is such an un-word. It holds the place for a power that underwrites the existence of everything – the ground of Being; but, as I shall suggest, it holds a place for more than that, otherwise some such phrase as ‘ground of Being’ would itself be enough. To Heraclitus it was the logos; to Lao Tzu the tao; to Confucius lǐ; in Hinduism Brahman, and to the Vedic tradition ṛta; in Zen ri; to Arabic peoples, since pre-Islamic times, Allah; to the Hebrews YHWH. And in the Western tradition it is known as God. […] Odd as it may seem, and though it is impossible to avoid the form of words ‘God’s existence’, it is even arguable, without denying God, that God does not exist. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, for example, says that God ‘exists, but not through existence.’ If you are frustrated by this deeply paradoxical form of words, I can understand; but do not succumb to the temptation to dismiss it.”
Whereas "ground of Being" (and the still more nebulous sounding "something more" of Mark Vernon) are ideas generally accepted by many, including New Mysterians like Thomas Nagel, the term "God" is not always received as warmly. Interestingly, the "ground of Being" idea may not be much of a stretch from atheism anyway, which requires a kind of fundament for matter to emerge from to begin with. The "God" idea can be differentiated from "ground of Being" in that it takes a sort of "personal psychology" approach to reality. It suggests that reality is not only conscious (in the ontological primitive sense), but it is personal as well. And this personal/perspectival/agential aspect is again ontologically primitive. It falls straight out of the irreducibly personal forms of attention described by the hemisphere hypothesis. So far, what's been described is all just standard monotheism. But McGilchrist introduces to this a less standard aspect, the theological paradox of panentheism, derived from the intellectual pedigree of process philosophers like Hegel and Schelling. And for McGilchrist, panentheism also opens the door to many other paradoxes, including simultaneous transcendence and immanence, one and many, good and evil, and union and division. It's not hard to see that paradox is directly implied by the opponent processes of the hemisphere hypothesis. In short, McGilchrist's theology embodies all those right hemisphere qualities, including the above mentioned ideas of process, person, and paradox.
Personalism
is the old foe of atheism. Paradox is the old foe of Western
philosophy. And both, along with process, are foes of the left hemisphere. I think many of the problems people may have with McGilchrist's presentation of God can be traced back to how he developed his hypothesis, and to how he views religion through that unique lens. But we shouldn't dismiss those problems. Consider, it was the unreflective acceptance of a personal deity, sometimes portrayed as overbearing and dogmatic, that atheism (and most recently the New Atheists) had helped to liberate people from. And that was part of a tradition with a legacy spanning centuries. Those who were and have long been excluded or marginalized by it are, quite understandably, not eager to embrace it again. As McGilchrist wrote "it is not surprising that people recoil from this idol". And for those who expect and desire simple consistency to ultimately prevail, the paradox of mutually reinforcing opposites is largely incoherent. For such reasons as these, many people will not proceed all the way to panentheism in our contemporary culture, and instead find it more comfortable to stop at "ground of Being", a formulation that does not compel us to feel things we do not feel, or to risk triggering cultural PTSD, or to venture into unfamiliar theological waters. But there's a helpful distinction that might be made here, as suggested by the title of Roderick Tweedy's book The God of the Left Hemisphere. Which hemisphere's conception of God is McGilchrist describing? That might be an important consideration.
In all this, we could also discern a sort of cultural evolution of religion, one that is reflected in the path of an ascending spiral. It originates in a primarily RH presencing to the numinous, sacred, and divine, which later falls prey to and becomes captured by the absolutizing LH. This is subsequently rejected by an opposing absolutism, that of atheism (via it's tools of reduction and elimination). I think we are now seeing greater disaffection with the blindness attendant to these LH forms of religion and irreligion. As this becomes more widespread, the beginnings of a return to the numinous origin of religion may be gaining momentum. This process of return is a wandering path however, producing many strange chimeras of the sacred and secular along the way. Religious instrumentalism has been around a while (see modern proponents like Alain de Botton, John Vervaeke, etc.). And labyrinthine Postmodern detours also abound in this liminal landscape. If we manage to escape these and other traps, there eventually follows a reintegration of what all the prior stages have taught us, and presumably a return to a RH form of religion. This would be a return with a difference (cf. tikkun, kintsugi), in that it brings along with it the elixir of a deeper understanding and appreciation.
The most challenging part of how I'm interpreting McGilchrist's view of the sacred here is the "personal" aspect of deity. But the concept of the limit case may help to illuminate it. In the same way that stillness is the limit case of motion and inanimacy is the limit case of animacy, atheism may be the limit case of panentheism, and eliminative materialism (or emergence) the limit case of panpsychism. The "hard problem of consciousness" is not a problem at all given panpsychist assumptions, as consciousness is simply an "ontological primitive". (For panpsychists, or at least for McGilchrist, upon death there may be a change in "degree of responsiveness", as when under general anesthesia responsiveness is extremely minimal.) Under the panpsychist paradigm the "neural correlates of consciousness" simply become reinterpreted as the "neural correlates of permissiveness". But perhaps this isn't going far enough. The limit case draws our attention to what is "essential to the phenomenon", or the "primary condition", so it challenges our contemporary cultural assumptions because it inverts the usual LH perspective. Which is to say that we may not be taking this "McGilchrist Inversion" seriously enough. Because if, under the LH dispensation, mind emerges from matter, then under the RH dispensation it may be more accurate to say that matter emerges from mind. In either case, death marks a transformation, in that what was emergent fades away and all that is left is what is "essential to the phenomenon". For the LH, this is matter. For the RH, this is more likely to be mind. If this sounds implausible, that may say more about the maps and tools we are using than the actual relationship between mind and matter. While the personal aspects of God (or equivalent un-word) may be contravened by LH presumptions regarding life and death, and mind and matter, those may more accurately be seen as inversions of a more veridical RH perspective, as I believe the limit cases demonstrate.
River Kenna's article "Solving McGilchrist's Big Problem" suggests some possible answers to the "What to do?" question. But there's the "what" to do, and then there's the "how" to do it. Generally speaking, the impression we get is that McGilchrist sticks to the how, leaving us to figure out the more specific what. Of course, we might probe this assumption a bit and ask "Why does McGilchrist avoid giving a list of practices?" And the most common reason provided is something he himself has parodied as "mindfulness to be a better stock broker". In other words, giving a 'list of what to do' runs the very real risk of missing the entire point. But if we look more closely at the question perhaps we'll find that his omission is only apparent.
At the start of the "So What Should We Do?" subsection of the Epilogue, McGilchrist quotes Schelling to support his contention that we must revise our concept of reality to include the sacredness of all. This then transforms our values, and thence our behavior. Now, upon reading this, Kenna (and many others) presumably say 'Very well and good Dr. McGilchrist, but how do we revise our concept of reality?' Just like Schmachtenberger, Kenna also wants "the hoped-for, knock-out blow". Moving from here to the end of the Epilogue, McGilchrist quotes Scheler: "every finite spirit believes either in a God or in an idol". And McGilchrist concludes, "Having abandoned God, our idol is ourselves, as God". This is some metaphorically very rich terrain we've entered, and so it is going to present us (and Schmachtenberger, and Kenna) with some big challenges. I'll first note that perhaps, contra Kenna, McGilchrist really is plainly suggesting what to do, and that the failure rather lies in our disinclination to hear it (perhaps in preference to a mechanistic or algorithmic response). I'll also note that the quote from Scheler sets up a duality, that of God and idol, which should remind us of the duality of RH and LH in his hemisphere hypothesis. And then there's the choice between the two that we are presented with, with the full weight of the argument laid out by McGilchrist behind it, as weaved through the pages of his book.
The simplest answer may be that McGilchrist easily distinguishes between God and the Ground of Being in TMWT, where he says that God both has Being and is the ground of Being "at one and the same time". Paradox and unity are both central themes in McGilchrist's metaphysics and his unique brand of crypto-theology.
Perceptual Depth
The podcaster Jason Seed, in reviewing The Master and His Emissary, remarked that, in regard to the way we see the world, "If having two eyes gives us a visual ‘depth of field’, I wonder if having two hemispheres in the brain gives us a kind of ‘depth of thought’ or something... It's like the difference between monovision and stereoscopic vision. It raises questions. How do the fields of vision work together? And how does that play out in the asymmetry of the brain and the lateralization of functions?” This idea of perceptual depth or "thinking in stereo" is a very rich metaphor. So let's consider how this plays out given their asymmetric qualities. The most characteristic asymmetry we must address is that the whole contains the parts, but the parts do not contain the whole. The RH sees the whole Gestalt, the LH sees the fragmented parts. But even though the RH vision of the whole contains the parts, it has no facility for manipulating them, and so it needs the LH for this very practical reason. Thus, in this "depth of thought" metaphor, we need both the right and the left hemispheres to both see the big picture and yet limit our attention according to the situation. Or put another way, the experience of "depth of thought" is generated by the "opponent processing" of two asymmetric hemispheres. That is, the phenomenological analogue of stereoscopic vision, where two eyes complement each other to generate a single image, is opponent processing, where two hemispheres complement each other to generate a single phenomenology.
The tendency to prefer visual input from one eye to the other, called "ocular dominance" suggests that asymmetry plays a role in stereoscopic vision just as it does in opponent processing. (You can quickly determine which of your eyes is dominant with a fast and simple test.) But the metaphor breaks down when we consider that the world as revealed by either eye is substantially the same, whereas the world as revealed by either hemisphere is markedly different. Though both of the perceptual modes provided by the hemispheres are necessary, one very good reason why the RH should be given preference is because it can see the whole, while at the same time it recognizes the parts and the limitations of a fragmentary perspective. This was metaphorically described centuries ago by Xunzi when he wrote that a person "may sit in their room, and yet view the entire area within the four seas; may dwell in the present, and yet discourse on distant ages". But by what means is this achieved? And how is it even possible? The possibility is through the perceptual depth afforded by opponent processing. And I'd suggest one route to realizing it is via the practice of artistic skill, that is to say, the application of an aesthetic (axiological) sensibility to life.
Art draws upon many of the capacities of the right hemisphere. It connects us to the infinite and the eternal through the embodied processes of life and the living. In that sense art is a 'portal' to these transcendent qualities, reminding us that the transitory obstacles we face in life, though they do exist on the map of our daily lives, are cast against the much broader background of love and beauty that surrounds us. Art thus enacts perceptual depth, which is a significant reason why it is compelling, and why it can be both an effective coping skill and a therapeutic tool. Calligraphy, to use but one example, is notable for being not about what the words are so much as how they are written. Broadly speaking, the plying of any craft or profession is no less an artform, insofar as it involves the application of RH capacities and embodied skills in a unique context. And this is why much is lost in reducing the work of an experienced physician, for example, to a series of checklists. In reading Erwin Chargaff, one learns that that he approached his work with the motto fodio in tenebris. He knew the extent to which art is a paradoxical pursuit.
Controlled Opposition
The phenomenon of controlled opposition is common in politics and economic affairs. Can the hemisphere hypothesis, and the opponent process theory it rests on, shed any light on this? McGilchrist has addressed the closely related topics of political polarization and extremist ideologies, on both the political Left and Right, but I don’t think this subject has been directly raised in conversation. As we know, the left hemisphere is a very poor Master. So the only way to preserve the illusion of competency is to engage in desperate acts of self deception. When things go wrong, and they often do, it needs to allow a controlled opposition to move in and take over, thus effectively preserving its illegitimate hold on power. Who or what is this controlled opposition? Another half-baked idea, illusion, or rationalization. We might ask: “Why not simply allow the legitimate RH Master to resume authority?” I do not think the emissary would countenance a complete admission of defeat under most circumstances. And so the practice of controlled opposition is applied to the Master as well.
The Emissary sees the Master as another strawman representation, but not just any strawman. The Master is the most strawman of them all, and one who must be repeatedly knocked over in favor of more obedient puppets. To the Emissary the world of the RH is something only a gullible idiot would believe. And of course, no sane person would behave like an idiot. So the dynamics of controlled opposition could help to explain the instability of the left hemisphere, whose unconstrained behavior somewhat resembles that of a gambling addict. It frequently exchanges one bad idea for another, marching each forward in rapid succession. Nonetheless, throughout all this it retains its grip on power. It does this by contrasting all of these bad bets with the obvious “idiocy of the Master”, which must be avoided at any cost. Thus the clear evidence of its own repeated failures at governance are excused as it digs its own grave. ...A short intro to controlled opposition, another tool for LH capture (along with more familiar ideas like propaganda and supernormal stimuli): https://youtu.be/DMmi5ExdKio
 |
| 1.30" Elrathia Trilobite with Bite Mark |
Charles Eisenstein (in conversation with McGilchrist): “Economics has created a world in the image of this [left hemispheric] way of perceiving, by converting the uniqueness of each thing in the material world into commodities that are ripped from their relational context. They’re strip mined, they're taken away from all their relations and made into products whose only relation to the consumer is the price. But it's not like this was just some bad idea, that we decided to use our left hemispheres instead of our right hemispheres for things. Rather we have a kind of a feedback loop, where these incredible powers that have come from this left hemisphere way of engaging the world have created an environment that further encourages that way of relating to the world." (12:09)
McGilchrist: "The Greeks saw that mythos was one of the paths to truth, and the other was logos. And initially they thought mythos (the origin of our word myth) was more important than logos, that it was the only thing that would reveal the 'big truths', and that logos was the kind of pettifogging reasoning that you do with an accountant." (42:40)
McGilchrist: "I think there is an ‘attractor’. I think that values attract us to certain ends. What worries me is that the only value at the moment is that of power, and it's a very attractive force for some people. What concerns me is that, in itself, it will degrade what a human being is... In almost every tradition around the world there are myths about people who are seduced by the desire for material things or for power, and how this leads everyone to destruction, not just the person but often those around them as well. It's one of the most common myths. So I think we ought to take it extremely seriously." (1:15:30)
McGilchrist also referenced myths in another conversation with Ash Ranpura: "I just had this image of this 'wise master' who was usurped by an 'emissary' who was bright, but not bright enough to know what it was he didn't know. And that's the danger. It's not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance that causes the problems. So I just took that idea, but then I found in the subsequent reading for this new book that this myth is present all over the world. It's there in the Chinese classic 'The Secret of the Golden Flower', it's there in the Vedanta, it's there in a North American Iroquois myth (with which I begin Part Three) about two brothers. It's stunning. It's like they intuited the interior relations; the left hemisphere as sort of slightly ignorant but rather dangerous and brash, and the right hemisphere as holding the whole picture and needing to be the one that takes charge." (34:38)
I'd note in connection with this that McGilchrist begins his book with mythos, in his retelling of Goethe's 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' as the master and emissary myth. Those themes are all the more vivid in the 'twin brothers' story retold by John Arthur Gibson (and seen elsewhere as well). He takes this mythic theme and then translates it into the logos of neuropsychiatry. This sort of thing has been done before by earlier analytic psychotherapists (Jung and Freud most notably perhaps), but the scope and depth with which McGilchrist appears to have taken it seems unprecedented. And now we, having seen McGilchrist place mythos into logos, can move logos back into mythos once again. And in doing so, we recognize that we never really left mythos to begin with. It's always already been there with us; it's already embodied in the fabric of the world, both figuratively and literally. While this may not exactly be the McGilchrist manoeuvre, it's analogous perhaps. C.S. Lewis wrote "myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to".
With Hilary Lawson, McGilchrist addressed the role of myth in Christianity: "I don't feel entirely certain what I think about Christianity, but it’s possibly the richest mythos about the relationship between humans and the sacred." …McGilchrist’s disinclination to grant his imprimatur to any single religious tradition (with the possible exception of Taoism) is definitely on point. Of course, adherents of various traditions might disagree over precisely which is richest, which of course cannot be definitively said, let alone the difficulty of evaluating each in isolation of the others.
More on religion, Sebastian Morello said: "The two congregational bodies that seem to be growing, particularly among the young, are traditional Catholic communities and Eastern Orthodox, which are very much liturgy based. So rather than going out and saying "Here are a set of propositions, and if you sign up to them you'll be saved", it's the ongoing encounter with God through a liturgical experience." (2:01:47) …The contrast between propositional logic (LH) and encounter (RH), in this case via religious ritual, is revealing. Though Morello singled out Christian denominations, perhaps due to his ‘European Conservative’ emphasis, David DeSteno has shown that the benefits of ritual practice are present across many traditions.
Ash Ranpura gave high praise for McGilchrist and his work: "I came to this as a neurologist and an academic trying to prove you wrong at every point I could. You know, calling friends who did stroke, calling friends who did functional imaging, and regionals, and it's really robust and thorough. I don't think there's anything you've really missed out in this very beautiful description. At the same time it's very readable. Part One of the book is a wonderful survey, an extensive history of neuroanatomy: lesion studies, split brain studies, callosotomy studies, stroke studies, the Wada test, and even some TMS I think is in there. And I've left out the stuff about how robust this is in the animal kingdom; you present evidence for how far back it goes in evolution. You know, really looking at how we have come to understand lateralization and hemispheric asymmetry. So as far as I can tell it's extremely comprehensive." (13:06)
Recounting his youth: “I went to my secondary school which was Winchester at the age of twelve… It won't be interesting to most of your listeners, but there is a big difference in culture between Winchester and Eaton. In Eaton (and it's a great gift actually, at least to the person themselves) people are taught very much to have confidence in themselves, to believe in themselves and so forth. But we were taught almost the exact opposite, to doubt ourselves all the time. In Greek there is a way in which things are argued, in which you have two particles ‘men’ and ‘de’ [μέν…δέ…]. You start ‘men’, which means “on the one hand”, followed by ‘de’, which means “on the other”. So everything was “on the one hand… and on the other”. And this was the way we were taught to think. So as soon as we express something we were to question it and to see if there wasn't something to be said for the opposite point of view. So actually that was drilled into me from a very early age, that seeing both sides of a question is incredibly important. And I wish that was part of more people's education because it could save a lot of unpleasantness, and violence, and aggression, and anger, and resentment, and so forth.” (12:48) “I’m a bit of a rebel… I often say that I'm the believer amongst skeptics but I'm the skeptic amongst believers… I've never been one of those people who has 100% certainty about anything.” (16:14)
McGilchrist: "What one is looking for is a balance, which would never just be a symmetrical balance between these two ways of thinking, but one in which the right hemisphere was able to take what the left hemisphere is designed to give it, and take that up into something greater." (47:44)
Douglas Rushkoff’s "Team Human" podcast also recently included two guests, each of whom have explored ideas relevant in this space:
David Brin: “The human brain and mind are vastly internally competitive. You are not one thing, you are many. But what comes out is very often a truly beautiful person.” (1:22:50)
Émile Torres: “Everything, from their [TESCREAL] perspective, is an engineering problem… it’s very white, very male, very Western.” (33:44) …Nice to see Rushkoff and Torres together – I've previously referred to each of these people as “McGilchrist’s bulldog”, and they don't disappoint here either.
One of the key assumptions is that the RH is consistently more veridical than the LH. Overall, this feature doesn’t change and is taken as a given. But the relationship between the hemispheres can and does change, with consequences for individuals and civilizations. So it is understanding this relationship that presents us with a challenge. How do we do it? There are two different hemispheres, and each is potentially capable of having two different relationships relative to each other. This yields four distinctly different positions. The first pair is that of the 'proper relationship', with (1) the LH as 'faithful servant' and (2) the RH as 'master' - a synergy. The second pair is that of an inverted relationship where (3) the LH 'dominates over' or 'adopts the role of' the master and (4) the RH therefore becomes an 'usurped' or suppressed master - an insurrection. So a simplistic "binary" way of approaching the hypothesis can only take one so far. Expanding that into a sort of "quaternary" might draw out some of the implications a bit further.
Applying the hemisphere hypothesis to public policy can be tricky work. Harold Hutchinson and George Yarrow sought to soften some of McGilchrist’s turns of phrase in order to make his work more palatable to the social sciences (and the contemporary academic community). In “To 'see', or not to 'see: that is the question: Moving on from a half-brained system of economic governance” (July 2023) their discussion of the ‘liberal theory of alienation’, the contrast between specialist and generalist, their necessary separation (with examples), and many other ideas all benefited significantly from the illumination provided by Iain McGilchrist’s research. A few selections:
Adam Smith observed that productivity growth appeared to be strongly related to progress in the division of labour [and] ‘exchange transactions’. …But he also ‘saw’ that, when the field of vision was expanded beyond that required to answer the basic co-ordination question, other implications of the specialisation entailed by a deep division of labour could, if left unchecked, be highly negative. He wrote:
But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
And that, in a sense, can be described as a ‘liberal theory of alienation’, very different from the kinds of Marxist thinking that came later. The separation that gives rise to problems is an estrangement from an individual’s own RH functionalities, i.e. from part of the individual’s own human capital.
If, therefore, by generalist is meant someone who can ‘see’ and at least partially understand the functioning of a whole system, not just particular parts of it, our arguments imply a call for more of these people in government, not fewer, and, more than that, for them to be concentrated in a distinct, ‘lateralised’ sub-network of the wider topology of government. To mitigate the steady gravitational pull of increasing specialisation in narrowly focused activities and of routinization, what is required is an institutional architecture that ring fences vital RH functionality and ensures that radar-like ‘presencing’ of an ever-changing economic system is never turned off and is always on call for decision makers.
Arranging this is feasible; and enlightened thinking, both ancient and modern, has recognised necessary separation (lateralisation) as a route to social progress. Plato’s Academy was formed outside the city walls of Athens to offer less distraction than would be the case within them. Its subsequent influences on European thought have been enormous and incalculable, still reverberating in education today. As a further example, speculae (watch towers) formed part of the architecture of a Roman fort or city. They were set away from the main fort, so there was an inhibitory element or necessary distance built into them. By construction, these relatively small pieces of infrastructure ensured attention could be paid to things that were acknowledged to be relevant, but invisible at ground level within the main fort. Thus, the structure provided a helping hand to the broader fort ecosystem. A small, specialist team of experienced and vigilant minds (the guardians on duty) attended in a sustained, undistracted and differentiated way to situations that would remain ‘unseen’ from an everyday viewpoint, but which were (potentially) of vital importance to the whole.
We would argue that creating/designing an analogous, hemispheric brain topology for Leviathan is a sine-qua-non if of half-brained rationality is not to continue leading into serial, routine crises. The current network topology of government is ill-adapted to the economic (and social and political) contexts that it now faces. It attends far too much to activities concerned with power, control and coercion, to ‘grasping’ actions that are the focus of the LHs of human brains, at the expense of attending to the broad surveillance and understandings of the highly complex, ever changing, adaptive system…
Government is seemingly locked into a monoglot LH structure by adverse feed-back loops, and the unwanted LH dominance has tended to strengthen over time. Without RH input, governments have become easy meat for the partisan lobbyists importuning Leviathan to use its monopoly power in ways that further their own narrow interests, without adequate consideration of their system-wide implications.”
Peale, Trump, and Positive Thinking
Hemisphere theory doesn’t correlate to political polarization in any straightforward kind of way. Instead, as McGilchrist has noted, it tends to cut across political divisions: both the political Left and the political Right can and often have exhibited the tendencies of either hemisphere. But with that caveat out of the way, as you can see in the selection below (edited from the transcript), McGilchrist’s opinion of Trump is unambiguous:
Sheldrake: “Positive thinking is huge in America. For a hundred years or more there have been all these books on The Power of Positive Thinking. One of the most perverse examples of positive thinking is the former president Donald Trump, who was raised in the church of positive thinking. The prophet of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, was the minister of Marble Church in Manhattan, where Trump's family went. As a teenager Trump imbibed all of this. Norman Vincent Peale married him to his first wife. He was absolutely raised on positive thinking. Just say something and you can make it come true through the power of intention, that’s the idea. So when he loses the election, he says he's won it. This is pure positive thinking taken to its most extreme.
McGilchrist: “In my terms, it's pure left hemisphere thinking, because the left hemisphere believes that it has the power to create the outcome it wants. It’s always an optimist. If something doesn't work out the way it believes, it will deny that ‘black is black’, it will say a paralyzed limb can be used freely. Its power to deny reality in order to fit in with its theory about reality is its defining feature. And I would say that Trumpism is just an expression of this mentality; it’s not one that I particularly want to take as my guide.” https://youtu.be/KyNgE6RsGnw?t=2952
The Rabbi and the Lottery
Iain McGilchrist: "You can’t understand something at the outset by standing outside it in a detached way and analyzing it and going “I don’t see the point of that.” There are many things that you will only see the point of when you’re actually engaged with them at all. And spiritual things are very much of this nature (and I know that that’s one of the focuses of interest for yourself). There’s a lovely story, which a Jewish friend of mine told me. There’s this Rabbi who’s praying, he says “You know, God, it’s all very well I’m committed to what I do, but I need money. I’m very poor. Really, I need money. Can’t you help me? Could I win the lottery?” And he prays all the time, and he never wins the lottery. Anyway, one day, he’s praying, and the Rabbi says, “God, why do you never let me win the lottery?” And this voice comes out of heaven, and says, “Mordecai, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket.” And there’s a spiritual truth in that, that if we sit there waiting for spiritual truth to plop into our lap, it’s not going to happen. It’s only by putting yourself in the way of it happening – in other words, a disposition of openness to it happening, not a closed mind – that will allow you to experience something that, once you’ve experienced it, you’ll understand fine. But ahead of time, you won’t." (full transcript)
Questions and Concerns
In her recent article "All Aboard the Relationship (Relationships Series Part 1)", Elizabeth Oldfield writes about her upcoming interview with McGilchrist, and what she hopes to ask him about:
That last phrase, "trying to resist instrumentalisation by instrumentalising" reminds me of a line McGilchrist cites from Heidegger: "The evil and thus keenest danger is thinking itself. It must think against itself, which it can only seldom do." But in the introduction to The Matter with Things I believe McGilchrist provides a more satisfying response:
The questions we grapple with include: What is a healthy relationship between the hemispheres? And what might that look like in a healthy culture? Here's another relevant passage from McGilchrist's book:
So the answer seems to be that, no, we don't necessarily have to make the case in "left hemispheric language" or engage in "non-relational systems". But it may be precisely because our culture exhibits many of the harmful features described above that many people have found the extended discussions within his books particularly helpful. And it should illustrate that, insofar as his writing comes across as a "left hemispheric way" of saying what others have been saying all along, it is intended as an example of how the left hemisphere can fulfill its proper role as a servant to, and advocate for, the world of the right hemisphere. The hope is that this will help that spark (already present in feminist philosophers, black theologians, artists, etc.) to "cross the gap" for people who are so thoroughly captured by the world of the left hemisphere that they have thus far remained unreachable. And it has managed to do that, judging by the reaction of many readers.
Do some of those who have been preaching this all along, only to be historically sidelined and silenced, feel somewhat exasperated that it took, by all accounts, a privileged pedant of McGilchrist's pedigree to reach these people? Yes, some do. And justifiably so! Others view this apparent progress and cross-cultural appeal with skepticism, pointing out the danger that his work could be used to justify a less-than-progressive political agenda. The misappropriation of the work of one person or group to forward the ends of another is unfortunately not uncommon. All these tensions should be addressed. And to some extent they have. McGilchrist has often expressed his concern and support for marginalized indigenous cultures. And the danger of having a hubristic emissary in the political arena is a moral lesson with wide appeal, however the ambiguity of exactly how the hemisphere hypothesis might be applied still makes some people uncomfortable. But given the need for contextually sound judgement, addressing our unease with ambiguity could be exactly the point.
So what relevance does McGilchrist hold for people who already recognize values and a sense of the sacred? For people who are not overly reductive and instrumental in their thinking, and who already live in a culture that has retained (or reclaimed) its customs and traditions? More directly, should "feminist philosophers, black theologians, artists", etc. be interested in a hypothesis that tries to explain (at long length) what they already intuitively understand? To take a non-Western example, in Japan Shinto beliefs are very animistic, even panpsychic, and there are many other features that place the Japanese culture more toward the right hemisphere when compared to Western civilization. But cultures can and do change, and knowledge, beliefs, and lifestyles with them. So the primary relevance of McGilchrist's thought, for people and cultures that are not captured by the world of the left hemisphere, may be in serving as a bulwark against colonialism (particularly 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".
 |
| The chiral tetragonal antiwedge (with its dual) |
McGilchrist: “It seems to me such a waste of time to try to create machines to be like people, when we're making people more like machines. It would be much better to make people better people - that is something we can do and it doesn't require any expense of resource. It doesn't require technology. It doesn't require wars in Africa over minerals that destroy the habitat and the ways of life of the people who have long lived there. It doesn't require people in China to kill themselves because they're being worked to make my iPhone. We don't need this. What we need to do is something really quite simple, which is to stop relying on machines to solve problems. All the things that we need we have within us. But we're not using them. We’re stunted versions of what a human being could be, and indeed at times in the past may have achieved. I could point to some of the periods in history where civilizations have really flourished. There was greater wisdom about culture than there is now. So we know it can be done. We know that people are not stupid, and they're not any worse morally than they ever were before, they just have more power.
Equality and Social Justice, and Postmodernism
There's a video titled "Why Identity Politics is the Left Hemisphere Gone Too Far" (2020): https://youtu.be/rJidKue2l3A
Interviewer: Could you give an example?
McGilchrist: Well, it might not be fair to somebody who has worked extraordinarily hard to achieve something, to have to find out that somebody else is being preferred over them because some sort of algorithm says that actually we haven't got enough of a certain group of people in the office or in whatever. That is equality of a kind that is really quite unfair and, I think, is also not actually helpful to the person who is being unjustly promoted over the head of somebody else. In the end, people being people, this will result in difficulties.
Interviewer: And we have to see people in the round.
McGilchrist: We have to see people in the round. And for God's sake, let's try judging them for 'what they are', not 'what they represent'. That's another huge difference between the right and left hemisphere. The right hemisphere sees the present person that is there with their qualities. The left hemisphere sees the category, the group, the tribe. So we are now tribalizing society in a way that is most unhelpful.
Interviewer: People sometimes start a sentence with something like "As a white man..." or "As a woman of color...", but not "As me..."
McGilchrist: Not "As a human being..."
Interviewer: And that would be a left hemispheric way of generalizing and putting items into categories?
McGilchrist: Yes. The trouble with it is that it has an element of goodness in it, obviously, but the difficulty is it's far too simplistic. It imagines the world is just a series of chain reaction events. But when you actually look at any complex system there are many loops that go off and affect the chain you were first looking at, so you've got reentrant loops, you've got reflexive effects, you've got the widening of effects that you've never thought of. So when you're dealing with a complex system, believing that "I'm right, and I know what is right" is really an example that you don't know what you're talking about. Because as you know more, as you have more experience, you realize you cannot be so sure.
An astute commenter pointed out that, in our contemporary context, where things are socially and politically stacked against a particular group, it may be necessary to first deal with the inequality between groups before we can meaningfully "treat people as individuals". If we don't deal with that first, then we will only reinforce the conditions for that inequality, which is itself premised on treating people as members of a group. Another commenter was more succinct, "Our society is built on ideological realism, which denies the possibility of fairness and justice (in terms of wealth, power, voice, representation, opportunities, resources, etc.) This inequality has been entrenched in rigid hierarchies and prejudicial systems for centuries and continues to this day. Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't make it go away."
Unfortunately, McGilchrist doesn't really address any of that in his above response. Instead, he was making a tangentially related point about the danger of over-bureaucratising inequality and why that may not be the best sort of solution to the problem. But, if he doesn't suggest a feasible way of dealing with these other important contextual aspects he may be justly accused of falling into the 'nirvana fallacy'. The questions this topic raises are important: How do we speak from within our unique context and experience, but without reifying abstract categories? How do we address tribalism and its effects without reinforcing it?
Perhaps a more skilled interviewer, such as Jonathan Rowson, would've been more capable of digging deeper into what's really "at stake here". I will note that in the course of the "Attention as a Moral Act" conversations that Rowson facilitated last spring, between McGilchrist and other thinkers, that not only did these include a wide cross section of people, from diverse backgrounds, but that it was also explicitly stated at the start of the Q&A sessions for these that they would preferentially select questions from audience members belonging to underrepresented groups (according to age, sex, race, etc.) in order to get a greater diversity of viewpoints heard. I was glad to see this progressive approach taken.
Deborah Stone's excellent book, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (1988) notes that there is a paradox in distributive problems: equality often means inequality, and equal treatment often means unequal treatment." Was McGilchrist then trying to describe equity? Regardless, he ended up just gesturing toward the more general problem of hubris and the difficulty of knowing how complex systems work. Though that may all be relevant, it failed to sufficiently address the topic. Afterwards, maybe his friends encouraged him to develop a more articulate response and have it ready at hand. Because the subject was raised again, about three years later, by Rupert Read in the context of social justice. On the whole, I think McGilchrist did a better job:
McGilchrist has repeatedly emphasized his concern for marginalized indigenous cultures. And as a result he has earned the respect of people like Rupert Read, who are advocating for progressive policies, and among whom the topics of equality and social justice are generally viewed as unequivocally good things. But given his very strong aversion to bureaucratic means for instituting and enforcing progressive measures (which endears him to conservatives), this relationship has at times been slightly strained. McGilchrist has an equally strong aversion to Postmodern perspectives on the relativity of value. This can lead to other unexpected, and for the most part unexplored, implications. For instance, his description of autism has been criticized as "dehumanizing" by those who advocate for greater inclusivity and normalization of neurodiversity. Why is this? Is it just a consequence of equivocation concerning our terms and definitions? To a large extent I think so, but there are deeper reasons as well.
If we return to McGilchrist's main thesis, it's clear that he is very critical of unbalanced, unbridled left hemisphere thinking, which effectively ends in normalizing various forms of psychosis, and results in malign forms of coercion, control, and impoverishment of our lives and world. The sighted should not be compelled to put out their eyes, forgoing the visible world with all its capacity for richness, on account of those who are already blind. Eliminating sight isn't the solution to blindness. That's perverse equality and distorted inclusivity. Instead we must recognize the condition of blindness for what it is, and perhaps then seek to restore sight to the blind.
This is of course just a metaphor for various forms of disordered thinking. But to generalize, rather than descend to the lowest common denominator by ironing out our differences, it would be better to raise everyone up, or at least not prevent them who seek to realize their potential (if that's what they want). And so McGilchrist is adamant about rejecting any policy, individual, or opinion that seeks to impose positions consistent with an overtly left hemisphere approach. But it can be difficult to recognize these distortions since contemporary culture, under it's influence, has led to the partial inversion of values. This cultural influence can make such opinions, stemming as they do from disordered thinking, seem innocuous or even laudatory.
Erik Torenberg remarked on another aspect of distorted inclusivity, in that the social dynamic surrounding mental illness, or what Freddie deBoer called “The Gentrification of Mental Illness”, creates an opening for opportunists, for people who are not struggling in the same way as real victims. There are at least two ways this occurs. Some people may claim victim status in order to receive the care that is afforded to real victims. It’s important to note that this usually isn’t the result of a conscious malicious intent, but emerges from a need for care that isn't being met in some healthier manner.
But in manifesting a decline in mental and/or physical health in order to elicit a caring response from others it can actually bring about a very real disease state, with serious health consequences. So although initially a product of social contagion, it is a signal that something else is very wrong. The second sort of opportunist seeks to "normalize the abnormal" as a "purity signal". Because inclusivity is already a purity signal within our culture, the actual harm that this misapplication of normalization (equality) results in is very difficult to recognize. But essentially, when the abnormal is redefined as normal it can lead to ignoring a very real problem and prevent treatment from occurring. Thus the actual victims are then deprived of receiving the care that would benefit them.
So how should we respond? Any claim of mental or physical suffering should be treated very seriously. But the job of the physician is to determine the actual cause (whether it is psychosomatic, organic, behavioral, environmental, or otherwise) and bring the patient to a contextually informed condition of health. A physician who preached acceptance of illness and disease, when such conditions might easily be avoided with preventative care, or are otherwise easily treated, is no physician at all. Perhaps in support of the physician's more objective perspective on health here (in contrast to Postmodernism's subjective relativity), there is in fact an observable, deep and abiding consilience, a cross cultural recognition of ethical and aesthetic value. Iain McGilchrist:
We need to accept our limitations, not to valorize them, but to humbly acknowledge that, in the popular phrase, 'we have fallen short' within certain contexts. This is a standard viewpoint of many religious traditions, and indeed one of the benefits of having an axiological perspective, which many postmoderns have given up. The 'representational meaning' here needn't be dogmatically held (axiology may be not only far more inclusive, but also capable of contextual evolution, much like Lee Smolin's evolving physics), but merely recognized. Then our attentional lapses are less likely to be projected onto the world in a solipsistic manner, but rather understood to be due in some part to our own shortcomings vis-à-vis relational alignment as well. Today many people are more willing to place blame on the world rather than accept the vulnerability of any personal limitations. But we should not feel compelled to have unrealistic expectations for ourselves, nor acquiesce to others who would suggest that in cases of misalignment we should be blind to their limitations. Such limitations are inescapable at any rate, and neither good nor bad in and of themselves, rather it is our mere blindness to them and occasional refusal to account for them that is harmful. Hence in religious traditions we see a tight link between recognition and reconnection. (Indeed the etymology of 'religion' means to re-connect.)
Neurodiversity and group selection
The prevalence of neurodiverse individuals (such as autists) within a population can be explained in terms of an "individual selectionism” model (which Randolph Nesse appears to follow) where diversity is mostly understood as deviation from a narrowly optimal range, and the result of over or under expression of some otherwise adaptive trait. But “group selectionism” is the other possible adaptationist explanation for psychological individual differences, and it may have greater explanatory capacity. According to this approach, neurodiversity confers an adaptive advantage to the population as a whole. This occurs when the prevalence is not very high, but at least above the "minimum adaptive prevalence", explained in terms of the population size and dynamics of traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Adam Hunt explored this "group selectionist" view in his paper "The Evolution of Specialised Minds". (The main points of which were also given in an online presentation.) To quickly summarize, if we assume that human cognition is optimized for specialization in various niches, then, for example, having a certain percentage of autistic people within a community may increase the group fitness, which benefits all members. (McGilchrist notes, "there is an argument that Einstein was autistic".)
Interestingly, I would note that it is also the group level that Iain McGilchirst is primarily concerned with. His thesis rests upon his ability to apply the insights of neuropsychiatry to cultures, though they were originally developed for understanding individuals. So synthesizing Hunt's “group selection” work for explaining individual diversity with that of McGilchrist’s “group selection” work for explaining collective health should be illuminating. We might thereby conclude, for example, that some people will exhibit a more or less LH way of attending, and others a more or less RH way of attending, and that this natural diversity at the individual level within a population is both desirable and good, so long as the larger group dynamics are consistent with the healthy asymmetry described by the hemisphere hypothesis. (To be sure, Hunt does view autistic traits along a spectrum, and distinguishes between health and disease such that healthy 'diversity' can become 'pathology' at the extreme ends of a normal distribution.)
We might also conclude, in line with McGilchrist's thesis, that the real import of the hemisphere hypothesis can only be understood at the integrative level above the individual, which is that of the group or culture. It is here that, largely in the absence of the balancing effects that conspecifics at lower levels (specific members of the group) would otherwise provide, that the emergent collective dynamics have significant existential consequences for the species (and levels adjacent to or above that, such as civilizations and ecospheres). This is simply a "multiscalar description" (formalization?) of the hypothesis. Today group selection might be associated most with the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who is a very prolific writer and speaker. He's frequently, and convincingly, remarked on the importance of evaluating individual traits in the context of group dynamics. The corollary is that it would be a serious mistake to evaluate individual traits only in the context of the individual. As McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary:
“...genes which, at least partly through their effects on lateralisation, result in major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder), and developmental disorders, such as autism and Asperger's syndrome... [may] have been bred out long ago, if it were not for some hugely important benefit that they must convey. If they also, through their effects on lateralisation, in some cases led to extraordinary talents, and if particularly they did so in relatives, who have some but not all of the genes responsible, then such genes would naturally be preserved, on purely Darwinian principles.”
Sources:
Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology (paper)
Extending Adaptive Explanations of Personality to the Evolution of Psychopathology (video presentation)
David Sloan Wilson: Chickens, Cooperation and a Pro-social World (podcast interview)
 |
| chiral quartz crystals |
Allan Schore provides additional support to McGilchrist's thesis:
This morning I reflected on several things. The first was that story from John Cleese about liminal states:
The second was that recent quote from Allan Schore:
Schore appears to confirm Edison's insight that there may be a noticeable change in consciousness at around the time one falls asleep. To this I can add my own anecdotal experience from last night. As I drifted into sleep I felt a wave of deep emotional resonance with others wash over me. The sort of feeling for which words seem inadequate. It was so profoundly moving that I woke again. And this, despite having no ball bearings (or any other external cue) to rouse me.
It reminds me of what McGilchrist wrote about permission: "I suggest that the function of the brain is to create by permission, in other words by acting as a kind of filter... Consciousness is sculpted: by saying ‘no’ to some things it enables others to stand forward into being." So, if the LH goes to sleep first, does that mean it is no longer able to inhibit that which the RH to present to? And which now is able to "stand forward into being"? Is this what I experienced the moment I drifted into sleep? ...Many years ago I had the privilege of working alongside Dr. Michael Hopper, a skilled psychologist with a wide background and interests (including Jung, dreams, and much more). One certainly experiences deep insights from time to time, and should note when they occur.
Thomas Steininger and McGilchrist
Thomas Steininger, editor of Evolve Magazine and Co-Founder of Emergent Dialogues, facilitated a dialogue with Dr Iain McGilchrist titled "The Brain, The Sacred, and The Soul". A brief Q&A with audience members followed afterwards. Many of these touched on different sets of complementary oppositions: humility and hubris, organism and machine, change and permanence, union and division, etc. Can you spot where these appear in the paraphrased selections below? (Refer to the timestamped links for the actual video segment with omitted context):
On consciousness and cognitive science:
[As an aside, comparisons between McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis and various theories of consciousness, such as those advanced by Friston, are common. For example, in The Web of Meaning, Jeremy Lent compares the hemisphere hypothesis to Gerald Edelman’s “primary and secondary consciousness”, and Antonio Damasio’s “core and higher-order consciousness”. But this may be a category error. McGilchrist’s hypothesis takes consciousness as a given, as an ontological primitive, and instead answers a related, though different question: Why has our conscious phenomenology (and the corresponding neurology) bifurcated (lateralized) in such a way that the world revealed by either hemisphere is so qualitatively different (presentation vs. re-presentation)? Lent’s “conceptual and animate” distinction is a better comparison, though this isn’t as fully articulated.]
On relational process ontology:
[For additional context, Matthew Segall recently noted that Michael Levin, and possibly Friston and Solms as well, are “redefining terms such that machine and organism are no longer opposed concepts”. To the extent that this is true, that portion of McGilchrist’s criticism would no longer apply. To the extent that this isn't true, McGilchrist has noted that "(1) actively co-ordinated processes, expressing a sense of (2) wholeness, inextricably linked with (3) values, (4) meaning and (5) purpose – each leading separately and together, to the phenomenon of (6) self-realization. None of these get to be applied to my car." To wit: "The organism model can embrace the mechanism, but the mechanism model cannot embrace the organism."]
On change and permanence:
On lateralization and language (semiosis):
So the challenge of creating an effective emotional language, as writers like Glenn Albrecht (and many others) are attempting, lies in whether the words and symbols take on 'something of the quality' of what they denote. If they aren't able to do that, if they just appear to be arbitrary symbols, then it might not be very helpful. One must be able to actually experience the emotions, then come to associate those experiences with the representation. Just showing the representation without an experience probably won't help. This gets us into Peircean semiotics (familiar to Gary Goldberg), which distinguishes between three different kinds of sign. In general ease of interpretation these are: icon (resemblance of), index (relation to), and symbol (by convention). Most languages begin with pictograms, which are icons, and then these become increasingly abstract symbols whose meaning we probably wouldn't associate with anything, except we've learned to by convention. In other words, the most faithful maps of our emotional terrain, which will retain 'something of the quality' of what they denote, will be iconic or indexical. They are more literal/mimetic, as opposed to the more metaphorical or abstract symbols. And incidentally, one might speculate (and indeed many have) that the reason Eastern cultures such as China and Japan have historically expressed a more RH perspective is due to their written language and its greater retention of pictographic elements serving as a kind of bulwark against excessive abstraction, and retaining a more embodied and relational perspective. Lauri Nummenmaa's work with emotions is mostly iconic, one might say, as one can see a pictorial representation of where one feels the emotion in the body. An indexical approach might use images that relate to the emotions in some way. Another easily cited example of emotion pictograms (icons) might be the popular emojis that have taken over so many "smart phone" text conversations. Linguists are having a fun time with those and how they may influence the future development of communication.
McGilchrist and D.C. Schindler
During a conversation with D.C. Schindler, McGilchrist explored several important themes including those of repair or reconciliation. (It's a theme that also appears in popular TV and film, such as The Dark Crystal, or Quantum Leap, whose tagline was "putting right what once went wrong".) A more detailed description of the story below appears in The Matter with Things, where a note in the margin reads: "The resonances with the Japanese concept of kintsugi are impossible to ignore. That one is a spiritual concept and the other an aesthetic concept should not, of itself, perturb a reader who has accompanied me this far."
“More importantly, it’s the wider cosmos whose deep structure we are inclined to misunderstand. It may seem obvious that randomness is the primary condition and that order is an unusual phenomenon that emerges from (how?), and is supervenient on, that primary chaos. However, order is not a special case of randomness, but randomness merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist. […] Randomness is the limit case of order (one that is strictly speaking impossible fully to achieve); not order the limit case of randomness... Too much disorder and there is no structure for purpose to express itself in: too little disorder and there is nothing to enable purpose to express itself with. ”
Akomolafe and McGilchrist
Here's a description of the first public conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Bayo Akomolafe. It was titled "In Search of Wisdom for a Broken World". McGilchrist began by delivering an abbreviated version of what's come to be known as "McGilchrist 101". This included a case for why we need to "change our minds", that is, our point of view toward the world, and the more metaphysical points he's outlined, including that "nothing is independent" and that "the cosmos is animate". He noted that rather than treating the symptoms of our predicament, we must remove the root cause of it. (To help make that point he used the metaphor of treating vs. curing/removing a cancer.) Again, rather than pursuing the "hedonic treadmill", we are here to respond to the values that come before us. He concluded by underlining the importance of nature, society, and the divine. To this opening, the audience applauded.
Akomolafe responded by noting that both he and McGilchrist "share disciplinary backgrounds" and began with his metaphor of the "ant mill", describing the moral of that parable as "the way we respond to the crisis is often the crisis". This is a point on which they both shared broad agreement. Like McGilchrist, Akomolafe also criticized the pervasive individualism that characterizes modernity: "we are not individuals acting on the world".
McGilchrist added to this a need for a "dual level vision" that combines the need for both collective action, and a simultaneous need to "start in our own lives", noting as well that it could be defeatist to think only in terms of scale or measure of the action required (which might lead one to ignore the scale of the individual). McGilchrist then moved into a description of the complementarity of opposites, referenced his oft-repeated "apple pie" metaphor (sweet and tart), and noted the cultural inversion that has favored power over wisdom in our contemporary world. The audience applauded.
Akomolafe responded "There are beautiful points of convergence in how we're framing this, and there are also points of divergence that I want to explore in the time we have". He described what he called the "sensorium" and glossed this to mean that "our ways of being and acting are not reducible to our bodies". The implication, he explained, is that our behavior is fundamentally ecological and "territorial" (a significant term in posthumanist thought), and can trap us in patterns. Was this a criticism that McGilchrist is reducing behavior to the body, in particular, the brain? He then noted a news headline from this summer, that "in times of global warming human brains shrink". He looked directly at McGilchrist, pausing for dramatic effect. Was he building a case in favor of the 'sensorium', or at least suggesting the 'hemisphere hypothesis' may not only be reductive, but have less explanatory power than he supposes?
On the defense now, McGilchrist responded that decreased brain volume also accompanies the processes of domestication in animals and the growth of civilization, or "farmed people". Returning to his main point, Akomolafe summarized that "the divide between the internal and the external is not as clear as it once was" and this is where "the seed of fugitivity and new upheavals can thrive". He then returned to the "ant mill" metaphor and extended this further, saying that fungal infection by Cordyceps allows ants to leave the ant mill. And so he asked: "What 'philosophical infection' would allow us to leave the convenience of modernity? To lose our way so we can find it? Where does decay happen, and how can it be a prolific emancipatory moment? That's the question." Akomolafe clearly enjoys paradox as much as McGilchrist. The audience applauded.
McGilchrist agreed with the point, but inverted the metaphor. He noted that "diseases can take us over and change the way we behave, and I believe that's what we're in now." He described once again how a cancer, by going rogue, destroys the host, which is a popular analogy for the current state of our world. "Sometimes, as with the ant mill, an infection might help you get out... though it might kill you afterwards" he noted, describing the gruesome consequences of Cordyceps infection. Both of these speakers, in demonstrating equal facility in employing the disease metaphor to describe either emancipation or incarceration, showed why they are in high demand. McGilchrist also lamented the "exponential growth of bureaucracies" as another example of "repeating a pattern that is the cause of the problem". He concluded by suggesting that, despite their different approaches, both he and Akomolafe are providing people who think that all we need is "more of the same", with the encouragement to stop and do otherwise.
Akomolafe added to this that the way to respond isn't with more information, it is to become something different that is "no longer available for surveillance" and that we must actually "become invisible". He noted that the paradigm of the "isolated, dissociated self" is dying: "It is our task, our vocation, to render useless this 'stabilizing project', to steal into the cracks and do something to this machine, together." The audience applauded. Akomolafe had referenced the posthuman tradition of philosophy, and some members of this are known to have transhumanist leanings. Which is why McGilchrist added a final remark: "Becoming 'better humans' or 'more than humans' is not something I want. Let's all take heart from the fact that we can do things, both personally and together, to move towards better values." Akomolafe agreed: "That's it!" The session ended and the audience applauded.
It was a brief 50 minutes together, but they shared two fist bumps, a hug, and affirmed their kinship. Overall it was camaraderie, not animosity, that characterized their interaction. And compared with the session that followed, they drew the biggest crowd. I found it interesting that, as noted, they used similar metaphors to draw different moral lessons. Nonetheless, the broad points they made using those metaphors were in either case the same. And they are advancing the same criticisms of society. McGilchrist's concept of a wholly relational, 'animate cosmos' and Akomolafe's concept of the 'sensorium' appeared fully consonant with one another. It was a missed opportunity that neither of them remarked upon this in more detail.
The main difference between them, in reference to this initial meeting only, is that Akomolafe is operating within the framework of posthumanism (in preference to, though not in exclusion of, neuroscience) as the locus of explanatory power behind these points and critiques, with some "new materialism" influences; it's "post-paradigmatic" and deconstructive. Meanwhile McGilchrist is preferencing the framework of neuropsychiatry to situate and undergird his points, though not in exclusion to process philosophy (as his opening statement illustrated); this tends more towards the paradigmatic and constructive. There are advantages and disadvantages to either approach, but the primary source of dynamism for each is different. I think, in many ways, posthumanism has fewer constraints. It's among the most metaphorically flexible traditions within philosophy that I'm aware of. It can be very rhetorically compelling and insightful. Most of the posthumanists I know are logophiles who are especially adept at coining and using neologisms, and juxtaposing novel turns of phrase. In contrast to this, neuroscience imposes more limitations, and with those come greater vulnerability to criticism (such as that news headline Akomolafe shared during their conversation, noted above), but the benefits of rooting a framework within the scientific tradition of experimental evidence, which has produced a massive, reinforcing body of work, are immense. Nonetheless, McGilchrist's attempted synthesis of neuroscience with process philosophy has many of the qualities of a 'Hail Mary' effort. That appearance is particularly strong when viewed from outside either of these areas.
We might say that each of these different approaches used by McGilchrist and Akomolafe is a 'map' of the world, a detailed description for how we look at, and relate to, the world around us. And each framework is also capable of viewing the other through its own lens, which generates interesting diffractive conversations like this. I think this particular session illustrated very well that they can both productively contrast with and, to a significant extent, confirm one another, especially since, as Akomolafe noted at the start, they share much of the same disciplinary background. These frameworks are not fully separable. It seems the event coordinators for the Planet Local Summit knew what they were doing by bringing them together. Maybe we will see more of this kind of entanglement in the future. It may be especially helpful to address what has been referred to as McGilchrist's "privilege problem" - an old, white, erudite former Oxford don may not be the best messenger to those still working through the consequences of a long legacy of colonialism. Here's the link to the livestreamed video: https://www.youtube.com/live/IJ6lm_ACYLk
