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Iain McGilchrist’s new 2-volume book was published earlier this week – I’ve not yet received my copy and was unable to attend any of the launch events either online or in person – but here is Iain with Jonathan Rowson of the publisher Perspectiva:
I’ve referred to McGilchrist and his “Master and Emissary” over 50 times in my work and had the pleasure of meeting him at one of the “How The Light Gets In” events. Here I’m just collecting a few key pieces before I receive his latest. First the RSA-Animate that Jonathan refers to:
And here the full-length The Divided Brain – Film.
And let’s add previews on his latest:
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- This Rebel Wisdom discussion with David Fuller.
- This Theos Think-Tank discussion with Nick Spencer.
- This How To Academy discussion with John Cleese.
- This How To Academy discussion with Philip Pullman (in which we also pick-up from one questioner who says he makes much use of McG references in the concept of “Brainspotting“.)
And post-notes:
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- Final review of the complete “The Matter With Things”
- Summary introduction What IS “The Matter With Things”?
- And “Channel McGilchrist” for all future updates?
Oddly enough, I’m reading The Master and His Emissary now. It finally arrived from the local library. I’ve hinted that I want my own copy for Christmas, because it touches on many of the themes of my blog.
As I read Matthew d’Ancona’s “The Kathleen Stock case. . .”, I’m reminded of McGilchrist’s thesis. “Amazingly,” d’Ancona writes, “it has become heretical (at least in elite intellectual and political circles) to assert the reality of biological sex, on the post-modern grounds that biology is a minor matter compared to self-identified gender.” This is very much a left-brain way of approaching the issue: The analytical point of view must be pressed home, regardless of context. Thus,to the left brain’s bemusement, this “niche issue” has come to dominate Tortois news meetings.
People who want urgently to assert the primacy of biology in cultural matters are simply insensitive to the cultural nuances. It’s not far from arguing that “men and men and women are women” to saying that men should dominate women because they are bigger and stronger and full of testosterone, while women are softer and more nurturing and accepting, and can’t run as fast.
The tone-deafness of rational thinkers who publish potentially incendiary books and then act offended because they’ve caused profound upset is risibly “left-brain.” By all means, if they think biology is underrated, they should pursue their academic work patiently and diligently. That they want to make a big noise about it, without a moment’s consideration of the context, shows how far the emissary has gotten out of hand.
I didn’t make those specific connections – but yes it’s the same agenda running through all the topics I post about.
Rationality-101 / “Left-Brain” is killing (cancelling) all other valid discourse – and that’s very bad for humanity.
I was really just rejecting your suggestion that the cancellation culture in “liberal” academic institutions (and would-be liberal media too) is not real or problematic – and much more far-reaching than just a few specific “famous” cases. Like it or not, more right-wing / Libertarian channels are much more “liberal” and welcoming. It’s a failure of the liberal-left.
I didn’t mean to suggest that cancel culture is not real or problematic. On the contrary, I referred to “‘woke’ bigots” in a recent comment here.
For a more nuanced view of “wokeness,” see my post at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/the-dream-of-being-woke/
Psybertron, do you have any views on the connection between McGilchrist’s left-mode/right-mode metaphors and political orientation (Left/Right and/or conservative liberal)?
My take is that both modes are present in all political parties and orientations, but I find that very often, those on the Left simply assumes everyone on the Right is left mode (ie bad) and everyone on the Right simply assumes everyone the Left is left mode (ie bad).
I think it’s much more nuanced than that. Any thoughts?
Hi Don,
hope it’s ok for others to jump in on this too – it’s a very good question.
My sense is that McGilchrist’s work would suggest the that RH (right hemisphere) people are usually in the center or moderate left/right politically. Strong or fringe left/right are both more LH driven, literal, aggressive, intolerant to ambiguities, driven by power and control.
Though maybe the far right will self-identify as being logically driven, while far left more emotionally/compassion driven. So the evasive part is how some dogmatic left wing ideas might actually be based on a LH modeled reality, not the more unfiltered reality of the RH. If any of this made any sense!
Hi Don, I see Richard has already replied.
No connection between those two uses of left and right.
(And parallels can only be coincidental. Linguistic confusion.)
The political compass left-right comes historically from two sides of the debating chamber – but when talking (social-democratic) 21st C politics I prefer to focus on the libertarian – authoritarian axis. http://www.psybertron.org/archives/15187
There will of course be connections between political values and left-right brain models – many in fact, it’s how we make decisions. Identity politics is one such area that interests me.
Agreed. Any relationships are empirical where we find people with different value sets.
And indeed it will tend to be the extremes on either political side that are trapped by their left-brained views.
Hi, Don. The same question interests me, and I touched on it in a couple of blog posts at my own site (The Divided Review, Part I: McGilchrist and Trump Nation, and Part II: The Doctrine of the Two Halves of the Brain). I meant to return to the subject, but so far I’m still not sure what to add.
I like Richard’s Emerson’s take, above, but McGilchrist’s overall approach seems to invite further interpretation in terms of 20th or 21st century modernism or postmodernism.
Glad to hear this refreshingly flexible view. Left-right politics has been squeezed into McGilchrist’s left-right framework in several attempts that look like failure to me. There are, as one commenter above noted, left-brain rigidly rationalist views at both extremes (though i would say, at and near the center as well)
Hi Don, I’m guessing this last comment was in reply to AJ from a couple of years ago?
Either way, yes – left-right in politics is something quite different to left-right in brains, even though there are obviously relationships between the way we think and our political views. In the brain sense, the balance is a dynamic integration of ways of attending to the world. In the political sense it’s some evolving version of that “Nolan Compass”.
Don’t know if you noticed, this post was an early view of The Matter with Things, and I did several others (note added at the top) culminating in:
What is the Matter with Things
https://www.psybertron.org/archives/15472
and
God Talk and McGilchrist
https://www.psybertron.org/archives/16273
I think Don’s comment might have been in reply to Richard Emerson. But it did get me thinking.
People on the political right tend to argue for the virtues of personal independence, self-sufficiency, determination, ambition and so on — or related religious or other models of ethics — while those on the political left argue for networks of support, frameworks of caring, or certain religious or ethical models of their own. The point is that the left-brainers on either side of the spectrum argue these things; this is what makes them characteristically left-brain in their approach. They aim to abstract certain principles, which they can then apply with mechanical reliability to political issues, typically through mechanisms of law and power.
For the past several hundred years, this left-brain approach has dominated public discourse. Those of a more right-brain inclination have up to now been mostly been ignored in the conversation, not that they are given to joining it. Their own approach depends on an appreciation of situation and story that comes with an immediate, non-abstracting style of engagement. It could be that the Internet has helped bring the right-brain approach into the public discourse, by breaking down the linearity of the more controlled, paced, one to-many media that dominated the span of years from the Gutenberg press to the last days of network television.
This leaves us with an ascendant right-brain approach, which in both left- and right-wing politics is unfortunately producing an incipent fascism. In contrast to the stable abstractions and mechanisms favoured by left-brain thinking, the right brain operates through more immediate and dynamic processes. The old mechanical structures of law and power have been replaced by complex and active psychic expressions, which work not by abstracting and then exploiting mechanisms, in the manner of the left brain, but by embracing and engaging personally with stories, in the manner of the right brain.
In practice this means promoting certain stories and demoting others. The left-brain way of accomplishing this newly ascendant goal, whether on the political right or left, is to devise laws to create certain types of society. The right-brain way of doing it is to engage actively in social influencing, which on both sides of the political spectrum has taken the form of thought-policing and deplatforming. This is why I mention it in connection with a rising fascism.
A lot there AJ.
Unusually, one thing you say I don’t see / agree with 🙂
“This leaves us with an ascendant right-brain approach, which in both left- and right-wing politics is unfortunately producing an incipient fascism.”
May have to read the whole more closely?
Maybe fascism is too strong a word for it, but I have grown concerned over the way the pendulum is swinging: from a dry materialism that has no time for right-brain thinking, to the recognition of such thinking as an essential supplement to scientific “ways of knowing,” out to the extreme of right-brain thinking as self-sufficiently correct. In the mood of the 21st century, I see the pendulum heading towards that other extreme, and taking expression in “political correctness” of all kinds, whether the noisome variety so commonly found on the left, or the variety considered “traditional,” which has its own list of things to be silenced and shut down.
This is not to say that we can’t do “right-brain thinking” correctly; it is only to observe, with trepidation, that it can be done incorrectly, and there are signs it is being done incorrectly. The trend, among intellectuals participating in the movement, to a neo-Catholic Aristotelianism is, to me, as alarming as it is promising. Things could go south, and this is a concern that has increasingly troubled my blogging. Probably my subtlest take on the problem was inspired by reading .The Marvelous Clouds. (See my post at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/?p=3610, which concludes, “There is some merit in the revolutionary attempt to accommodate the subjective within the real, but there is also a danger. If we are really done with alienation from nature, then this time, as we again prepare to partake of an enchanted world, we need to remember that it’s not about us.”)
Really wonderful and complex thinking. I appreciate it.
I have read and studied at some length, both of McGIlchrist’s books. While they’re wonderfully suggestive, they are to me, rather reductionistic and I must say, a bit left brained (if I must use his metaphor) in their over simplification.
Sri Aurobindo wrote, in the early 1900s, of the two tendencies of the “Buddhi” (roughly, the intellect, though in yogic or contemplative terms, it is that faculty which can be turned away from teh sensory world and discover teh Consciousness underlying all phenomena; hence one with an “enlightened” Buddhi is considered a Buddha.
Yes, but there is a physical consciousness of the body, and an instinctive-emotional consciousness, various levels of intuition which aren’t captured by McGilchrist’s thesis, and much else besides (a casual look at St. Theresa’s 7 mansions reveals infinite dimensions beyond what McGilchrist hints at)
Also, McGilchrist is often asked what to DO about these limitations of hte left hemisphere. He used to just throw up his hands, but more recently has suggested a kind of dull, desiccated version of mindfulness (or he says “Oh any practice is just left hemisphere manipulation”) those throwing out several thousand years of Christian Jewish, Sufi, Vedantic, Buddhist, Tantric, Taoist and other contemplative practices.
A truly integral psychology is yet to be born.
Thanks Don, it’s an occupational hazard when writing a technical book that the story becomes very left-brained, so it’s very important to get / understand the intended content despite that. (Obviously many of the best philosophical books are works of rhetorical fiction – but here Iain is writing for “people that believe in science” – his would-be academic audience. I think we are the already converted.)
I don’t find him “reductionist” though – definitely more objective than his own thesis, per above.
As you note in practice he is participating in many more “mindful” and even spiritual / religious contexts.
I don’t think he has anything “wrong” just doing the best with the tools available?
(Don’t think he’s throwing out anything, not least the VALUE of left-brain capabilities. He’s not saying all “practice” is left-brained either, just the grasping / outwardly manipulative kind. Clearly inward contemplative spiritual practice isn’t predominantly left-brained.)
You’ll have to point at actual examples of his if you want to sell me this story 🙂
Did you pick-up on my Mark Solms’ references to add to Iain’s brain story?
Do you know Pirsig? Similar to McGilchrist, after writing his magnum opus (x2) he shrugged and threw up his hands and refrained from any more dialectical interaction, and said “get on with your practice” I’ve said all I need to say 🙂
I don’t generally get involved with comments about my work, but Don Salmon paints a picture so far away from anything I recognise -pretty much the precise opposite – that I thought I’d drop in a word or two.
In passing, I think it is interesting that he finds my work over-simplifying and reductionist. I don’t want to get into a long defensive discussion, but I’d appreciate clarification, since the whole thrust of my work is non-reductionist and usually considered quite complex and sophisticated. Does he know of a more sophisticated treatment of hemisphere differences, or deny that such differences exist?
He writes that ‘ there is a physical consciousness of the body, and an instinctive-emotional consciousness, various levels of intuition, which aren’t captured by my thesis’. I am puzzled that anyone who had really read my work could come to the conclusion that I am not aware of these faculties, or that I do not encourage them, and awareness of them, in a scientific world which generally gives them too little credence. I often risk rejection by mainstreamers because of my constant counter-cultural advocacy of them. Has he read the three long chapters on intuition and embodied cognition, and a fourth on intuition and imagination, in The Matter with Things? I am really astonished at this reversal of my position.
And again he writes: ‘[McG] says “Oh any practice is just left hemisphere manipulation”, those [sic] throwing out several thousand years of Christian Jewish, Sufi, Vedantic, Buddhist, Tantric, Taoist and other contemplative practices.’ I advocate spiritual practices, and have my own. Never have I said ‘any practice is just LH manipulation’! What I have said is that I am wary of the tendency of the LH to want a few things to do that will make everything all right again, without really addressing the need for a whole change of heart and mind. I advocate attending to the ‘temple within’. I am an advocate of religious worship and its often profound ceremony. All my life I have read, admired and learnt from eastern and western traditions and their practices. In my early life I intended to be a monk. When I stay in a monastery I usually attend 6 out of 7 offices during the day.
I may be a poor practitioner, but I am not the enemy he perceives.
I am not claiming anything for myself! I just wouldn’t want a prospective reader to carry away from Don’s dismissive commentary a false view of my work. It has helped very many people.
Please excuse this intervention!
Thanks for engaging Iain, no excuse required.
I did, perhaps too gently, suggest Don had got his reading of yourself wrong 🙂
Hopefully see you at HTLGI2025 ?
Have you seen Emily Herring’s biography of Bergson ?
Collected some thoughts here, referring to yourself several times in my review.
https://www.psybertron.org/archives/19021
Regards
Ian
I’d like to thank Dr. McGilchrist for honouring us with his comments. Rest assured that those of us who hang around WordPress blogs don’t take everything we read too seriously.
Thanks for your kind reply, psybertron Ian!
I am giving HTLGI a miss this year, as I am fairly heavily involved in the Oxford Literary Festival at the beginning of April, and I can end up never being at home on Skye – which is a shame. Perhaps in Oxford?
And thanks very much for your comments on Bergson, and acknowledgement of my use of him. I have been asked to write an introduction to a new edition of Creative Evolution, so all good to hear.
Best wishes,
Iain
Hi Iain,
I have actually bought tickets for the Friday and Saturday in Oxford, so may well have an opportunity to talk.
Take care.
Ian