Value Capture

McGilchrist’s most fully articulated description of why cultural shifts in the direction of left hemispheric thinking (sometimes referred to as LH 'capture' or 'insurrection') can be found in his Preface to the 2019 edition of The Master and his Emissary:

1. 1. "The LH view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff."
   2. "The LH view offers simple answers."
   3. "The LH's world view is easier to articulate."
   4. "We have created a world around us which... reflects the LH's priorities and its vision."
   5. "The hemispheres... have a different take on everything - including on their own relationship."
   6. "A culture that exemplifies the qualities of the LH's world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar."
   7. "Though the 'takes' of the two hemispheres are made to work together below the level of conscious awareness, they are not strictly compatible." 

Speaking with Rich Archer, McGilchrist noted that empires try “to administer too much, take on and influence too many things, and thereby overreach themselves. And the only way they can do this is by a sort of very bureaucratic take: everything is rolled out the same, everything is procedural, everything is categorical, all the fineness, the individuality, the responsiveness goes and everything becomes very cut and dry.”

Or as McGilchrist put it while on The Nocturnists podcast: “If you try to express the right hemisphere's point of view, you have a very difficult task. It’s much more subtle. Many nuances have to be conveyed, and a lot of what it has to say could seem contradictory. The messages that the right hemisphere would have given are fainter. In our modern society, the very ways in which they would have come to us in the past have been neutralized or minimized or almost dismissed." ...As our culture moves more in the direction of the LH’s priorities and vision, a reinforcing positive feedback cycle has taken over that is very difficult to break free from. 

In other words, in larger societies the logic of power and control (the raison d'etre of the LH) tends to overwhelm an awareness of reality (typically mediated by the RH). The implications of LH capture, and the substitution of its priorities, vision, and values, are further explored in C. Thi Nguyen's paper Value Capture. As he writes, in cases of value capture “we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of our own rich particular and context-sensitive experience of the world.” I’ll quote extensively from Nguyen’s paper below. According to him, value capture happens when:

1. 1. An agent has values that are rich, subtle, or inchoate (or they are in the process of developing such values).
   2. That agent is immersed in some larger context (often an institutional context) that presents an explicit expression of some value (which is typically simplified, standardized, and/or quantified).
   3. This explicit expression of value, in unmodified form, comes to dominate the entity’s practical reasoning and deliberative process in the relevant domain.

"This looks like: people who pursue step counts even when it hurts their knees and exhausts their spirit; academics who pursue publications in the highest-ranked journals even when their work feels boring and meaningless; universities that pursue high rankings in the USNWR over richer understandings of education; newspapers that pursue clicks and pageviews over their own sense of newsworthiness and social importance. And, as I have noted: the empirical work indicates that this sort of robust value capture is actually quite common."

How does this process occur?:

"We take values as provided by some large-scale institution and live under them as given. Those values will have been formulated to take deeply into account various institutional interests: like the ability to be counted in a reliable way across a large institution and the ability to be readily aggregated in an institutional bureaucracy. They will not have been formulated in light of the rich feedback of how our particular lives have gone when we live under these values. In value capture, we adopt values that have been formulated in a way that is insensitive to and therefore less able to support our rich, subtle, and personal emotional experiences.

The problem with internalizing institutional metrics is not simply that we are getting our values from the outside. It is that such metrics are subject to the demand for a certain kind of stability and institutional usability. These institutional demands push our metrics away from the subtle, the dynamic, the sensitive—and toward what can easily be measured at scale, propagated across institutional units, and recorded in institutional memory. When we take on such metrics as our values—when we internalize them—we are imposing a narrowed filter on our values. We are letting the logic of institutions play a determining role in the articulation of our values… the narrowness of the metric creates a narrowness of institutional vision. Institutions can only see, process, and act on parts of the world that are counted by their metrics. Anything that does not impinge on those metrics is invisible at an institutional level.

In value capture, we internalize those narrowed metrics, thus narrowing our values. And insofar as our values drive our attention, then the value captured will be subject to an analogous effect to narrowed institutional vision. It is not that we literally do not see things that fall outside our narrowed values, but we will not devote much energy to them or dismiss them as unimportant. Think here of the businessperson who thinks that only money matters and who immediately dismisses from mind any unprofitable ventures—like art or philosophy. [In a footnote, Nguyen adds:] The value captured agent can be wholehearted (think of the capitalist all-in for money), fully identified with their work, energized, and motivated. They are not divided against themselves; rather, they are simplified, where that simplification has been guided along institutional lines.

Qualitative ways of knowing are nuanced and context-sensitive. But qualitative information is difficult to manage en masse and difficult to transfer across contexts. Qualitative evaluations usually require significant shared background knowledge to adequately interpret. When we transform information from a qualitative to a quantitative format, we strip off much of the nuance, texture, and context-sensitivity. By doing so, we create a portable package of information, which can be easily sent across contexts and understood by people with little shared background… For this reason, quantitative methods are preferred by large-scale institutions, which must pass information across many levels of hierarchy—between distant administrators with low shared context. In other words, quantifications are preferred in large-scale institutions precisely because of their narrowness and their context-invariant stability."

What can we do in response?:

"What this suggests is that we should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, some at smaller community levels, and some individually. And the upshot here is not that we should reject all large-scale values. It is that we should maintain a variety of differently-scaled values. There are many cases in which it might be useful to participate in a larger collective effort and so to accept, as part of that collective effort, less finely tailored goals. But, at the same time, we can confine those large-scale, standardized goals to our life inside those collectives and not let them swamp the rest of our values. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values and let the largest-scale values swamp too many of our smaller-scale values. The problem comes when we let the demand for large-scale legibility intrude into every aspect of our lives, even the most intimate ones."

Podcaster David Pizarro, in conversation with cohost Tamler Sommers, reviewed this paper (I highly recommended listening to this for a very accessible introduction) and summed up one of the conclusions in this way: “Standardization is necessary the more complex society gets, and the bigger institutions get, because you need to ‘boil down’ information into a form that lots of people can understand; it’s unsustainable to have experts making all of those decisions.” This makes sense in light of the evidence. Nguyen provided a thorough description of the risks involved in that process, and perhaps unbeknownst to him, elaborated an idea key to McGilchrist's thesis concerning "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western world." A related concept is that of "surrogation."