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4 hours ago
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Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.
I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot see that it is limited. We no longer seem to recognise what it is we do not know, what our way of being in the world is pushing out of our lives and out of our world. To understand what is going on we need a breadth of view that is increasingly rare. It is the possibility of this that I intend to explore here today.
Let me ask you this. Do you think there is a connexion between realism, the appreciation of uniqueness, a capacity for understanding melody and harmony, an aptitude for appreciating time, a sense of humour, the ability to read body language, to sustain attention, and the fight-or-flight mode; or on the other hand between a talent for manipulation, a givenness to literalism, to theory at the expense of experience, unreasonable optimism, and a preoccupation with detail, as well as a loss of a sense of the living body, with in its place a focus on body parts? Perhaps not. Yet I assure you there is such a connexion in either case. It is rooted deep in us, and it is quite coherent once one comes to understand what underlies the pattern.
My reason for starting here is to introduce a body of work generated over three decades and published in two long books, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,[1] and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.[2] In these books, I examine critically and in depth the matter of hemisphere difference, and its important meaning for our lives. As you can see from the deliberately random selection of respectively right and left hemisphere tendencies above, the distinction is not the simple one that many might have heard, and which should be unceremoniously buried. It is not at all the case that the left hemisphere is unemotional and dependable, whereas the right hemisphere is flighty and fanciful. If anything the contrary is the case.
But that a question has been wrongly answered does not invalidate the question. Rather this should, in my opinion, invite further exploration. Consider these facts: the brain, an organ the power of which consists solely in making connexions, is massively divided down the middle—why? Moreover it is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured, at many levels, in both its structure and function—why? Not only that, but the band of fibres that connects the hemispheres at their base, the corpus callosum, is getting proportionately smaller, not larger, over evolution—and is, in any case, to a large extent inhibitory in function. Again: why? Could it be that two aspects of brain function are being kept apart?
Unfortunately I cannot spend time on the evidence here; for one thing, there is a great deal of it, and it requires to be examined at length. It is laid out for that purpose in the two long books I have mentioned. I am going to go straight to a characterisation of some of the core findings, so please forgive me if these are lacking in finesse: to some extent that is inevitable for present purposes, as I’m sure you will understand.
In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved, for classical Darwinian reasons, to pay a different kind of attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me, because I had been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive ‘function’. But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance. It creates and moulds the only world we can know.
The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow-beam attention, focussed on a detail that we already know and desire, and intent on grabbing and getting, whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is on the lookout for everything else that is going on while we are manipulating: for mates, conspecifics, offspring—and predators, so as not to be eaten while eating. Its attention is broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant, and uncommitted as to what it may find: the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere. In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole, which is nothing less than the world. And context changes everything. The difference, then, is not, as used to be supposed, to do with what each hemisphere ‘does’—as though it were a machine—so much as the manner in which it does it—as though it were part of a person. The hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute: indeed, it is universally attested. And since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention, such a difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds. Hence my belief that attention is a moral act. It helps form both us and the world we come to know.
What are these two worlds like?
Very briefly, if crudely, these worlds could be characterised like this. In the case of the left hemisphere, the world is simplified in the service of manipulation: it is made of isolated, static ‘things’; things moreover that are already known, familiar, predetermined, and fixed; they are fragments, that are importantly devoid of context, disembodied, and meaningless; abstract, generic in nature, quantifiable, fungible, mechanical: ultimately bloodless and lifeless. This is indeed not so much a world as a re-presentation of a world, which means a world that is actually no longer present, but reconstructed after the fact: literally two-dimensional, schematic, theoretical. Not in fact a world at all: more like a map. Nothing wrong with a map, of course, unless you mistake it for the world. And here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control. The left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom.
In the case of the right hemisphere, by contrast, there is a world of flowing processes, not isolated things; one where nothing is simply fixed, entirely certain, exhaustively known or fully predictable, but always changing, and ultimately interconnected with everything else; where context is everything; where what exists are wholes, of which what we call the parts are an artefact of our way of attending; where what really matters is implicit; a world of uniqueness, one where quality is more important than quantity—a world that is essentially animate. Here the future is a product of realism, not denial. This is a world that is fully present, rich and complex, a world of experience, which calls for understanding; not the map at all, but the world that is mapped. The emotional timbre here is more cautious, and in general more realistic.
We need both of these ‘worlds’ to work together, but also independently: hence the need for connexion and separation. Naturally we are not aware of this disjunct, because these worlds are combined at a level below our awareness. We become aware only after an accident of nature, such as a stroke, tumour or injury; or after commissurotomy, the so-called ‘split-brain’ operation; or if one hemisphere at a time is experimentally suppressed. Then they may become suddenly, vividly, present to us. Yet, because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties, when we come to reflect self-consciously, and to rationalise about what we find, we are forced, by the requirement for consistency, to choose between the pictures of the world they offer. This is why, as AN Whitehead observed, a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself.[3] Once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse, as in our postmodern world they are, the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires. Yet almost everything that really matters to us—the beauty of nature, poetry, music, art, narrative, drama, myth, ritual, sex, love, the sense of the sacred—must remain implicit if we are not to destroy its nature. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature: we can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these all-important but hidden sources, from closeness to the long tradition of a society, to nature and to the sacred, to sophisticate our understanding. In fact we see these not as irreplaceable guides to truths deeper than those that science can encompass, but as lies. Possibly entertaining lies, but lies nonetheless. We begin to see only the self-created, self-referring world according to the left hemisphere. We go for the machine model: reductive materialism. And the consequences are all around us.
Unfortunately the two hemispheres are not equally veridical. In terms of our ability to apprehend—take hold of and use—the world, the left hemisphere is superior; but in terms of our ability to comprehend the world, the right hemisphere is superior. In each of what one might call the portals to understanding—attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence (that is, IQ), and creativity—the right hemisphere is so much superior that the left hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional. That is not a rhetorical expression: denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to the right hemisphere—and consequently dependence on the left hemisphere—than the reverse. On its own the left hemisphere confabulates, makes up stories so as to fit with its beliefs: it will frankly insist that a paralysed limb is unaffected, or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the subject at all. Unlike the right hemisphere, which sees more than one angle, and has for this reason been called by VS Ramachandran ‘the devil’s advocate’, the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right.[4] It is never wrong and never at fault: someone else is always to blame.
Furthermore, in what I take to be the four important onward paths towards truth—science, reason, intuition, and imagination—though both hemispheres contribute, the crucial part in each case, including in science and reason, is played by the right hemisphere, not the left.
Our predicament is that we now live in a world, the understanding of which is largely limited to that of the inferior left hemisphere. Some signs of this include: our inability to see the broader picture, both in space and in time; the way in which wisdom has been lost, understanding reduced to mere knowledge, and knowledge replaced by information, tokens, or representations; the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment, which are the products of experience; the divorce of mind and matter, resulting in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction and the debasement of matter to mere, lumpen matter, there for our exploitation; an exponential growth of bureaucracy and administration; everywhere the proceduralisation of life; the reduction of justice to mere equality; a loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things; the supplanting of quality by quantity; the abandonment of nuance in favour of simplistic ‘either/or’ positions; the loss of reasonableness, which is replaced by rationalisation; a complete disregard for common sense; the design of systems, not for humans, but to maximise utility; a growth of paranoia and pervasive mistrust—for if all is not under its control, the left hemisphere becomes anxious, and projects its anxiety outwards onto others. Nonetheless, we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives. In addition, I might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere: the destruction of social cohesion, and its replacement by angry warring factions. Like almost everything that used to be said about hemisphere differences the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong: the most highly lateralised emotion is anger, and it lateralises to the left hemisphere. And there are more indications, but for today’s purposes I will stop here.
In the second part of The Master and his Emissary, I traced the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern. First there is a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two hemispheres in harmony. There then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most; and soon a decline, after which the civilisation eventually crumbles under its own weight. I trace this pattern beginning in the Greek world around the sixth century BC; in the Roman world around the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; and in the modern world with the Renaissance. In each case it is apparent that the vitality and harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it overreaches itself, becomes less creative, more and more sclerotic, unimaginative, over-administered, over-hierarchical—and power-hungry. There is a coarsening of values. Where goodness, beauty, and truth had once been the guiding values, power, the need to control, holds sway.
I am sometimes asked why, if the right hemisphere is more intelligent and by a long way more insightful than the left, this progression is always leftwards. It is a good question. In brief there are a handful of reasons.
First, and most obviously, the left hemisphere view is designed to aid us in grabbing stuff. It controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing. As such it is seductive—not to say addictive.
Second, the left hemisphere view sees a very simplified schema of the world and offers simple answers to our questions. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all, and offers the same mechanistic model to explain everything that exists. When reductionist thinking encounters a problem in reconciling apparent irreconcilables—for example, matter and consciousness—it simply denies that one element or the other exists. That’s very convenient.
Third, the left hemisphere’s world view is easier to articulate. Though language is shared between hemispheres, speech is almost always confined to the left: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. And the map is ipso facto vastly simpler than the complex terrain that is mapped. Almost everything that really matters cannot be found there or in the banality of discursive prose.
Fourth, importantly there is, or should be, always an appeal from a theory back to the empirical evidence. If you like, the left hemisphere has a theoretical model; the right hemisphere looks out of the window to see if the model corresponds with experience. Since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. What we see around us now—looking out of the metaphorical window—is rectilinear, manmade, utilitarian, each thing ripped from the context in which it alone has meaning. And for many, the two-dimensional representations provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience of three-dimensional life, in all its complexity.
Fifth, built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything—including on their own relationship. Essentially the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on what is offered to clarify, ‘unpack’, and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched, whole. The left hemisphere’s contribution, then, is valuable, but must come at an intermediate stage. Problems arise when this is treated—as it now often is—as the end stage. Analysis is a valuable tool, but breaking things down must be followed by an attempt to understand the whole once more. Unfortunately the left hemisphere is unaware of what it is missing. It cannot see the Gestalt, the ultimately indivisible whole. Therefore it thinks it can go it alone.
Sixth, a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere’s world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar, especially in the areas of science, technology, and administration which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary life. They then make us more like themselves. My worry is not that machines will become like people—an impossibility—but that people are already becoming more like machines.
Finally, I have already referred to the problem that a civilisation that is increasingly cut off from its intuitive life relies more heavily on exchange of explicit ideas in the public forum. Here, though truth is manifestly complicated and many-layered, an awareness of inherent ambiguities, and a capacity for seeing both sides of a question, is no longer considered a strength. The right hemisphere’s view is multifaceted and already takes into account the left hemisphere’s point of view; this virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore liable to be dismissed.
I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world, intellectually jejune and morally bankrupt as it is, that has resulted in what has been called the metacrisis: not just the odd crisis here and there, but the despoliation of the natural world; the decline of species on a colossal scale; the destabilisation of the climate; the destruction of the way of life of indigenous peoples; the fragmentation and polarisation of a once civilised society, with escalating, not diminishing, resentments on all sides; an escalating, not diminishing, gap between rich and poor; a surge in mental illness, not the promised increase in happiness; a proliferation of laws, but a rise in crime; the abandonment of civil discourse; a betrayal of standards in our major institutions—government, the BBC, the police, our hospitals, schools, and universities, once rightly admired all over the world—which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy, inflexible and obsessed with enforcement of a world-view that is in flat contradiction to reality; and the looming menace of totalitarian control through AI. These aspects of the so-called metacrisis have a multitude of proximal causes: economic, political, social, psychological, technological, and so on. But beneath and beyond that, each manifests, within those realms, aspects of the left hemisphere’s dysfunctional view of the world.
The very thing that originates the problem also militates against seeing the problem. Seeing the wider picture—a necessary prelude to understanding—is now increasingly disfavoured, and as a consequence the crises I have referred to are often seen as isolated pieces of bad luck. But they are not: they could have been, and were by some, predicted. The metacrisis is the predictable outcome of a complete failure to understand what a human being is, what the world is, and what the one has to do with the other. And all this is the sort of thing the right hemisphere is far better able to understand than the left.
The rightful Master, the right hemisphere, has been subjugated by his emissary or servant, the left. In an entirely predictable parallel, we have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant, as so many have predicted since the time of Goethe: we cannot say we were not warned. Even physics now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken. But because of our success in making machines, we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we come across. We ourselves, our brains and minds, our society, and the living world are now supposed to be explained by the metaphor of the machine. Yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire known universe are at all like a machine: namely the machines we made in the last few hundred years. Machines, unlike life and all complex systems, whether animate or inanimate, are linear and sequential; are put together, part by part, from the ground up; and can be switched on and off at will. Their default status is stasis, not flow; they are not resonantly embroiled with their environment; they have precise boundaries; their parts do not change structure and function as the whole evolves—not least because in a machine the whole does not evolve; and they are utilitarian constructs in service of the power of their maker. None of this applies to life—nor does it to anything else in the universe. The brilliant mathematician and biophysicist Robert Rosen, in his book Life Itself, demonstrates just how unlike machines organisms are.[5] He further argues that the best way to understand all naturally occurring systems—which are never merely complicated, but complex, and therefore never fully predictable—is as organisms, whether we choose to see them as alive or not. And that’s before one gets to consider the neglect of our emotional, moral, and spiritual nature, which is at the core of being human.
We seem to have been seduced into thinking we understand everything, and what’s more can master it and mould it, like a machine, so as to provide a future that will benefit mankind. That this is a malign fantasy becomes plainer with every passing day. Those with grand schemes to improve humanity have caused misery on an almost unimaginable scale by their narcissism, cruelty, and wilful blindness. In psychology there is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which tells us that the less people know, the more they think they know. It’s hardly rocket science, I admit, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Instead of seeing all things as processes, running organically from the past to the future across time, and spreading out across the world through space, like water finding its way across a landscape, we see ourselves and the world as composed of static slices—here and now—compartmentalised in a way that conforms to the modus operandi of the left hemisphere. A world of meaningless bits. We owe nothing to, and can learn nothing from, history—or so we believe. We owe nothing to, and need leave nothing to, posterity. We turn a blind eye to the inevitable impact of our rapacity on more humble and more stable ways of life that have stood the test of time better than ours. We neglect the importance of context: we believe we are right, and that one size fits all, justifying the imposition of vast global bureaucratic structures, not to say wars, so as to impose our thinking on cultures far different from our own. Equally we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic view of the world we have generated in the last 20 years and which, we believe, must now be forced on all, whatever their reasonable misgivings. And we treat people not as unique living beings but as exemplars of a category.
One aspect of this is the virtual machine known as bureaucracy. Famously Hannah Arendt referred to the banality of evil.[6] One of the most disquieting aspects of the Nazi regime was its chilling bureaucracy: mind-numbing evil was committed by people who were, for the most part, not conventional monsters but were simply following the ordained procedures: real people and real life had been almost wholly obscured by pieces of paper, and the recording of numbers. After the war, Theodor Adorno saw developing around him what he called die verwaltete Welt—the administered world, in which everything was controlled, proceduralised, and devitalised.[7] Inevitably at that point in history this could not be separated from the evil that was Nazism; but Adorno could see that it was much more than that. Nazism was at least as much a symptom of a new mentality as its cause, a mentality of total control that had taken root in the form of a self-legitimising bureaucracy, the roots of which lay in the past. He quoted the mid-nineteenth-century Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger: ‘life no longer lives’.[8] Who does not recognise with a chill this diagnosis of the modern predicament? And Adorno points out that it is not even the triumph of the logical—since administration serves to rationalise the irrational: which explains why its workings and outcomes are often deeply unreasonable and deeply damaging.
The cancerous growth of more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, bureaucracies in the worlds I particularly know—hospitals and universities (but the same could be said of government, schools, and the police)—is an inevitable and dangerous consequence of the worldview we have adopted. The other, if possible still more dangerous, expansion is that of AI. Bureaucracy and AI go hand in hand, enlarging the empire of the left hemisphere, and making possible, if not inevitable, in the near future, almost total control of the populace by any regime, however malignant.
As we broaden our view, it becomes apparent how much the metacrisis can best be seen as a war on nature and a war on life. This, my friends, is the reality we face. Why on earth should such a suicidal war come about? There are three reasons that spring to mind. One is that the left hemisphere, which makes us what Benjamin Franklin called the ‘tool-making animal’, thinks like a machine, and has therefore exported machine-like thinking into our environment everywhere. Nature and life are therefore ultimately an impediment. The second is that the left hemisphere really only understands its own representations, what it itself has made, and given to itself. Nature and life are therefore ultimately incomprehensible. And the third, and most important, is the resentfulness of a mind that believes it understands and can—and what’s more should—control all it surveys. Here nature and life are a rebuff to its power, a rebuff which cannot be tolerated. The German artist George Grosz produced a shockingly vivid expression of this mindset as he contemplated Europe before the Second World War, entitled ‘I shall extinguish everything around me that restricts me from being the Master’.
The contemporary fantasy that we can be whatever we want and do whatever we want is a cruel travesty of the truth: this was never true and never could be. It is the product of a culture of narcissistic fragmentation. Ironically we have invented new impediments to its fulfilment. We now live in a world in which you cannot speak or act until you have put each word before a humourless inner tribunal, which is ready to say no to everything you want to say or do. I am of course a boring old stick, but I feel so sorry for young people now—whatever happened to the spontaneous act, the sense of joie de vivre, to the movement of the spirit out of sheer exultation? Even an impulse to visit a gallery soon runs into the need to have booked weeks ago using an app. And that’s just getting into a gallery: what about negotiating the numberless hazards of a date? Life no longer lives.
Wisdom, skill, judgment, intuition, and even understanding—all to be gained only from a life well-lived— have been sidelined in favour of machine-like algorithms that stifle true thought.
The assault on life continues. As far as a mechanical system is concerned, human beings must be dispensable and wholly interchangeable; in fact, despite the rhetoric, true diversity is not to be tolerated. Imaginative eccentrics lose their jobs. Humans must have no allegiances which might conflict with their duty to fit into their slot. Thus it is that we have seen concerted attacks on the idea that there are differences between men and women; attempts to brainwash children; attacks on family and kinship, with their rightful claims on loyalty; on the professions, whose expertise must be replaced by blind rule-following, and their codes of ethics, which a machine cannot understand and which is therefore replaced by the pretence that teachers, doctors, and priests are just providing a service to consumers, rather than embodying what are ultimately sacred duties. Indeed that anything should be sacred is an affront to the power-hungry left hemisphere-dominated mind: belief in a divine cosmos is seen as standing in the way of whatever society the machine hurtles us towards. Milton saw it all. Lucifer the Bright cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he. And the very word society reminds us that no properly functioning society is mechanistic. So we see social cohesion dissipate and living traditions erased: in their place fragmentation, the stoking of resentment, and the rise of aggression. This in turn is deemed to require what de Tocqueville presciently described as a ‘network of small complicated rules’ that he foresaw would come to strangle life itself.[9] Once the integrity founded in an intuitive moral sense is lost, a society becomes like a building that has lost its integrity, and needs to be shored up with evermore scaffolding. Now there has to be a law for everything—yet crime escalates.
Why, when we see how devastating this process can be, do we carry on promoting it? The physicist David Bohm reflected on a phenomenon he called ‘sustained incoherence’, characteristic of what he called ‘thought’, the thought processes we now know to be typical of the left hemisphere.[10] What he meant was that on seeing incoherence it would be intelligent to stop, look for the cause, and change tack. But he noticed there was a reflex defensiveness in ‘thought’ that leads instead to obstinate continuation. In other words the left hemisphere, above all else, does not want to hear why it might have got things wrong.
I see widespread evidence of this sustained incoherence in corporations, governments, health systems, and education—everywhere that management ‘culture’ holds sway—that when things go wrong it is never that we have been travelling in the wrong direction, or have gone too far in what may once have been the right direction; it’s always that we have not gone far enough. This links to the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know, the smarter you think you are. But a further finding by Dunning and colleagues reinforces the relationship with the left hemisphere mindset, because of its preference for simple linear algorithms and procedures that, it believes, ‘logically must’ lead to a certain outcome. Those who have bought into such procedures think they must be in the right, even when the outcome ought to compel them to the opposite conclusion. Psychological experiments show that once they are committed to their theory of how things work, drawing attention to its obvious failure in the real world leads not to a flicker of doubt, but to a rise in confidence and redoubled efforts along the same line.
I’m sure we can all think of many such dead ends in the world around us, but I want to refer to just one here: the squandering of trust. This has the distinction of being at the same time supremely important and almost completely ignored. Truth and trust, words which come from the same root, naturally go together. One cannot have trust in a society where there is no truth; and one cannot be true to a society in which there is no trust. As Confucius told his disciple Tzu-kung, for a stable society a ruler needs three things: weapons, food, and trust. If he cannot hold all three, he should forgo weapons first, and food next; for ‘without trust we cannot stand’. Trust costs nothing but the time to build it, and once built it is a fantastically efficient way for any human enterprise, to operate. But it is easy to lose. There is a Dutch proverb: ‘trust arrives on foot, but departs on horseback’. The massive complex of administration and AI do nothing to promote a society of trust, but actively undermine whatever is left of it at every turn.
Being trustworthy is no small thing, and its importance needs to be inculcated at an early age, and then nourished by both individual and society. No one will believe in us if we cannot believe in ourselves. We need to start believing in ourselves again—and deserving to be believed in. Once people lose pride in being as good as their word, doing the best job they can, and expecting much of themselves, rules have to be enforced from without, and a penal code substitutes for the moral code it helped to destroy. Mediocrity quickly displaces excellence. Boredom replaces vitality. This is not only vastly less effective, but hugely costly in terms of administration and litigation, not to mention time and morale, and leads to a wicked problem: once trust has been lost, it is not easy to remove the scaffolding of rules and procedures which have come to take its place. In the world of capital, older European business practices based on honour have been grossly undermined by a ‘smarter’ paradigm imported from America, in the pursuit of short-term gain by defectors. This was very short-sighted. Trust has also been lost in the world of schools and universities, hospitals, the police, and the army—all of which now have massive recruitment problems, because the perception is that lives of service are no longer respected, or properly rewarded; that the necessary creativity, independence, self-reliance, and initiative required by a skilful professional will be stifled; and that the best candidates will not be supported and promoted because of a patronising agenda based on the ticking of boxes, and militating against excellence. Like civilisations before us, which drifted further and further to the outlook of the left hemisphere, we would appear to be engaged in committing suicide, intellectual and moral—if not indeed literal; for I fear that the Western world may no longer have the will or the skill to defend itself against authoritarian enemies that we cannot just wish away, because in our theory they don’t figure.
We seem sometimes bemused at how so often a path that looks promising leads us somewhere almost opposite to where we intended. But seeing the picture in the round we start to see why the outcome we wished for eluded us. We feel we are beset by paradoxes. In The Matter with Things, I devote a chapter to logical paradox; and explore around 30 of the best-known paradoxes that have intrigued and largely baffled philosophers historically. In every case, I explain why the apparent paradox can be seen as stemming from the different dispositions towards the world offered by the right and left hemispheres. This doesn’t mean, however, that each take is equally valid. In Zeno’s well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, although he purports to prove that Achilles can never catch up with, never mind overtake the tortoise, we know perfectly well that in real life he can overtake the tortoise in a couple of strides.
As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. Studies of rates of psychopathology in adolescents, relying on serial contemporaneous assessments using the same objective instrument and meeting stringent standards, over the period from 1938 to 2007, show that there were between five and eight times as many students that met a common cut-off for psychopathology in the latest cohort compared with the earliest, and this may be an underestimate because many recent subjects were already stabilised on an antidepressant, a possibility that did not exist for the earliest cohorts. Rates of suicide, which have always been about three times higher in men, are rising most steeply in young women.
We privilege autonomy and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. We also find that the technology places an enormous burden on our time, alienates us from human intercourse, and exposes us to risk from organised criminals—and mind-control by disorganised criminals such as governments. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get ‘value for money’, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resources. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with—let alone relish—uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions at any one time. Which is all it can.
If these paradoxes surprise us, it is because we have not thought far enough ahead in time or broadly enough in space: we take a small part of the complex for the whole. The awareness coming from the right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way round. When the hemispheres are working together under the unifying influence of the right hemisphere, the effect is not purely additive, but transformative. However, since the left hemisphere not only ‘takes in’ less, but understands what it does take in less well, our almost exclusive reliance in contemporary Western culture on it, the servant, is a problem of some considerable proportions.
The three things on which human flourishing and well-being most depend are these: belonging to a cohesive social group which one can trust, and with which one can share one’s life; closeness to the natural world; and communion with a divine realm, however conceived. This is not just my opinion, but borne out by a vast and ever-increasing body of research. But none of this accords with our current value: power. It is hardly a surprise, then, when we see that material affluence does not make us happy if accompanied by spiritual poverty.
Let me finally consider the influence of left hemisphere capture on the realm of value. For over two thousand years, in the Platonic, and later the Christian, tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as orientated towards three great values: goodness, beauty, and truth, each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the sacred. During my lifetime, I have seen each of these important values, along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled. A model that favours the machine over the human being, the inanimate over the living, is one that is corrosive of all that is beautiful, good, and true. And has no place in it for the sacred.
The early twentieth century philosopher Max Scheler was much concerned with questions of value. When he died in 1928, Heidegger, who gave his funeral oration, described him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time.[11] Scheler thought there was a hierarchy of values, with those of pleasure and utility—the values of utilitarianism and the left hemisphere—at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred, which he considered the highest, a value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between were, first, the Lebenswerte or values of ‘life’, such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility; and then the geistige Werte, the values of mind or spirit, such as beauty, goodness, and truth—which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere.[12]
The left hemisphere’s raison d’être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and hedonism, those of the lowest rank in Scheler’s pyramid, first. I may be wrong, but it is my distinct impression that there has been a decline in courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility in our society—indeed in all behaviour that carries its costs upfront, rather than concealing its sting in the tail. Speaking the truth takes courage, and it would seem that those in our public institutions would rather conform than confront untruth. And along with the loss of courage to speak the truth, there has been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred. All of this combines to reinforce a loss of sense of purpose and direction; hence the crisis of meaning that it is, by now, a commonplace that we face.
Scheler calls the human being ens amans, the being that is capable of love; in its place we have homo economicus. In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Scheler’s perception, and in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego over all else. This has rendered many virtues, including but not confined to beauty, goodness, and truth, obsolete. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions, are ontological primitives, for they are aspects of the ground of Being: our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege, and indeed, I argue, our purpose. This is why there is life. We can of course also ignore them, devalue them, and cause them to wither away—at what cost to us personally and to the whole of the living world we can only surmise. The world we are creating is one that ‘computes’ as far as the left hemisphere is concerned, but is grossly impoverished, demoralised, and lacking in meaning. One that is, in sum, more fit for a computer than a human being.
I’m often asked what we need to do about our predicament. This is understandable, of course, but I think that any list of bullet points, though no doubt needed at one level, risks missing the point almost entirely at another. For it is not that we took the wrong decision here or there, but that we have completely lost direction because of the value we have come to espouse. As I get nearer to the end of life, I am more and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a fulfilling life, the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing natural world at large, but every bit as important as survival itself. What I mean is this: even if we were by a massive effort and a massive stroke of fortune enabled to prevent any further loss of the world’s forests, reverse the pollution of the oceans, reverse the decline of species, and similarly tackle the other aspects of the metacrisis I have mentioned, this would be in vain unless we underwent a complete change of heart and mind. For we would still be the same hubristic, entitled, resentful power-hungry animals that we have become. And this, like the rest, has everything to do with the dominance of the left hemisphere’s mode of being.
So what are we to do? I could list the bullet points, which along the way would inevitably refer to reforming the education system, to a revival of the humanities, a serious reduction in bureaucracy, to the cultivation of meditative or spiritual practices, to abstinence from social media, keeping machines in the background where they can be helpful but away from intercourse with humans, and much more that we all know might help. And of course it goes without saying that we must tirelessly seek to stop, and where possible reverse, the damage to Nature—I will not call it the environment, since the term expresses the separation from Nature that is part of the problem. But these will not in themselves heal a matter of psyche, of soul. There is no quick fix for such problems, alas. As a psychiatrist, I would often know after listening to a patient for an hour or more on their first visit, what it was they needed to do. And when I was inexperienced I used to tell them. That was a mistake. Until a person truly sees for him- or herself, from the inside, what it is they need to do, they will not do it, and once they do see it, they will not need to be told. The work is to get them to that place.
The good news is that we can begin the healing work, each one of us, today. People say: ‘But what can I do? The world is so huge and I am so small’. And sometimes they add ‘and our planet is so small in an incomprehensibly vast universe’. But this is to think in the left hemisphere’s terms, measuring and quantifying. When the lover says ‘my love is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the skies’, how large or small is that? All the important changes happen from in here, not out there. If we could recover some humility in the face of our ignorance; some compassion in dealing with our fellow human beings; and some sense of awe and wonder before the cosmos, we would be already a long way along our journey. It has been said that if we could change radically the hearts and minds of only 3% of people, we would be able to make the changes we need to see in the world around us. For this we need to understand ourselves anew. Gnothi seauton: know thyself. We need every insight we can get into what we are doing to ourselves, to life itself, and to our inexpressibly beautiful and complex world. I hope I may have here offered one such insight, however small. The work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know.
Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist FRSA is a British psychiatrist, philosopher, neuroscientist, and Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His books include The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).
The above is an edited version of McGilchrist’s Darwin College Lecture, delivered in Cambridge on 9 February 2024.
[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press 2009).
[2] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols (Perspectiva 2021).
[4] See VS Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind (HarperCollins 2005).
[5] See Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Columbia University Press 1991).
[6] See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin 2006).
[7] See eg Theodor Adorno, Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1972).
[8] See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Suhrkamp 2019) 20.
[9] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Doubleday 1969) 650.
[11] Martin Heidegger, ‘In Memory of Max Scheler (1928)’ in Thomas Sheehan (ed), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Precedent Publishing 1981) 159-60.
[12] See Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Meiner 2014).
