Iain McGilchrist on General Pathologies of Perspective
Discussion
Eric Schaetzle:
"In his interview, Shankar Vedantam summarized Iain McGilchrist's work thus: "Iain believes the brain is divided into two hemispheres so that it can produce two different views of reality. One of the hemispheres, the right, focuses on the big picture. The left focuses on details. Both are essential. If you can't see the big picture, you don't understand what you're doing. If you can't home in on the details, you can't accomplish the simplest tasks. This fundamental difference in orientation turns out to have profound consequences. He argues that differences in the brain and Western society's preference for what one hemisphere has to offer have had enormous effects on our lives." McGilchrist added: "I am suggesting that we have arrived at a place, not for the first time in the West, where we have slipped into listening only to what it is that the left hemisphere can tell us and discounting what the right hemisphere could have told us. I think what I observe is a sense of social alienation. The way in which we live divorced from the natural world, which is a very new phenomenon. The insistence on extreme positions, which is what the left hemisphere understands, not a nuanced argument about the pros and cons of every single thing. Meaning comes out of living in a consistent culture where there is a sense of connection with one's past. And not just one's own past, but the past of the people who made you who you were, with the other people in the society to which you belong and to the world at large. The natural world and things that are just simply beyond our ken, the transcendental. These are very important things that the right hemisphere's much better equipped to understand, and I feel the loss of them in modern life is grievous." In a later interview with Curt Jaimungal he explained: "The nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white, either/or way of thinking. So we must for our own sakes get back to seeing that it's a both/and world, in which you may have truth on your side and I may have truth on my side and we ought to respect one another and talk about it in a grown-up way. Not vilifying, hating, and silencing people, but listening to people who say things different from ourselves. That's so fundamental. It's how our civilization got to have a culture, and now we're throwing it away. This sudden rise in the "not being shades of meaning" does distress me very much. [cf. Xunzi: "There are two things it is important to do in the world: to perceive the right in what men consider wrong, and to perceive the wrong in what men consider right." (page 136, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings)]
Arran Gare took a closer philosophical look in his review of McGilchrist's book, "The Master and His Emissary". He wrote, "The introduction of the book includes a story from Nietzsche of a wise spiritual master who, in order to rule his domain, carefully nurtured and trained emissaries. Wisely, he kept his distance from them, allowing them to do things in their own way. The cleverest and most ambitious emissary took this temperance and forbearance as weakness and irrelevance, adopted the master’s mantle and usurped his power, establishing a tyranny, which, lacking the master’s wisdom, eventually collapsed in ruins. McGilchrist’s book is an effort to justify and illuminate (and implicitly critique) Nietzsche’s insights into the nihilism of modernity (along with the insights of other anti-nihilist philosophers), to rethink the history of Western civilization to reveal and better characterize what has been lost through nihilism, and to open a more satisfactory path beyond nihilism. He reinterprets the story in terms of the relationship between the two cerebral hemispheres. While they should balance each other with the right hemisphere being the master, they have been in conflict, with the left hemisphere trying to suppress completely the right hemisphere. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, science and the arts and the seismic shifts characterizing the history of Western culture. The usurpation of power by the left hemisphere and its suppression of the right hemisphere has engendered a sickly culture characterized by a mechanistic view of the world, domination by instrumental reason, fragmentation, loss of meaning and loss of direction, all combined with a fatuous optimism. McGilchrist points out the common features shared between people with right-hemisphere damage and the psychopathology of modern and postmodern culture:
"In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia. In either group, subjects find it difficult to understand context, and therefore have problems with pragmatics, and with appreciating the 'discourse elements' of communication. They have similar problems in understanding tone, interpreting facial expressions, expressing and interpreting emotions, and understanding the presuppositions that lie behind another's point of view. They have similar problems with Gestalt perception and the understanding and grasping of wholes. They have similar problems with intuitive processing, and similar deficits in understanding metaphor. Both exhibit problems with appreciating narrative, and both tend to lose a sense of the natural flow of time, which becomes substituted by a succession of moments of stasis. Both report experiencing the related Zeitraffer phenomenon in visual perception (something that can sometimes be seen represented in the art works of schizophrenic subjects). Both appear to have a deficient sense of the reality or substantiality of experience (‘it’s all play-acting’), as well as of the uniqueness of an event, object or person. Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense. In both there is a loss of the stabilizing, coherence-giving, framework-building role that the right hemisphere fulfills in normal individuals. Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focused attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualizing and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualized analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise - for example, to scrutinize the behavior of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behavior. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the left-hemisphere’s view of the world." (p.392). To this Robert Ellis added: “According to Iain McGilchrist, the modern world offers passive, alienated disengagement and detached over-aware introspection, the loss of a grounding sense of self, a loss of meaning, bizarreness and absurdity, and a tendency to veer between fantasies of impotence and omnipotence. An increased incidence of schizophrenia is paralleled by a rise in other right hemisphere (RH) deficient conditions in the modern world, such as anorexia, multiple personality disorder and autism. The left hemisphere is unable to maintain continuity of intention over time or exercise self-control, as it will identify completely with a passing desire without giving it any wider context. It is this conflict between desires at different times that creates conflict within us over different priorities, whilst external conflict is of course between the LH of different people, or collectively of the people comprising different groups.” Regardless if one believes these are attributable in any way to the physiology of brain lateralization, the sort of deficits described by McGilchrist are nonetheless very real.
Arran Gare summarized, "Philosophy is not one discipline among others, but the form of inquiry that not only puts all other disciplines in perspective but all intellectual inquiry in relation to life generally. It is the discipline that above all must counter the tendency towards fragmentation, including the fragmentation of intellectual inquiry into different disciplines and sub-disciplines and between scholars, experts, and technocrats. It is only a book of the scope of The Master and his Emissary that can hope to provide the kind of perspective on the current state of civilization and what is required to overcome its diseased state." In his review of the book, he described McGilchrist's thesis as “we are in a culture in which people’s left hemispheres have usurped the role of their right hemispheres and everything is seen from its perspective." McGilchrist sets himself the task of clarifying where civilization has gone off the rails and how it has failed to realize what is possible. Noting that there are two kinds of people, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t, McGilchrist emphatically aligns himself with the latter. His argument is more complex than aligning himself with the right hemisphere against the left hemisphere. It is an argument that the development of the whole brain is required for humans to realize their full potential and to experience and understand the richness of the world, and this requires that the right hemisphere’s role not be usurped by the left-hemisphere, which, as the potential of the frontal lobes develop with the advance of civilization, it is prone to do."
"To understand the impact of a culture in which people’s left hemispheres have usurped the role of their right hemispheres, it is important to appreciate the asymmetry. Those with right hemisphere dominance are constantly striving for integration. Those with malfunctioning brains, however, can only think in terms of conflict and are unable to properly appreciate the conditions of their own existence. They have no sense of their own limitations and the limitations of this way of thinking, and are self-assured in a way that people with healthily functioning brains, who are prone to self-doubt and melancholia, can never be. The left hemisphere thinks in terms of power, and sees the right hemisphere “as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion”. It creates a decontextualized world broken up into meaningless fragments which appear to be unreal, where vitality appears attenuated, and where things themselves seem insubstantial, to lack corporeal solidity. Because of the sense of detachment, people begin to doubt the actuality of what they see, wondering if it is in fact all ‘play-acting’, a pretence, unreal. This culminates in the decadence of modernity, a devitalized world characterized by boredom and an insatiable quest for novelty, a quest that requires more and more money and is never satisfied. Unless they are checked, once a relatively stable order has been achieved people with greater left hemisphere dominance are likely to be more successful than people with healthy brains. With their manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes, they become successful parasites on others and on public institutions. The most problematic and damaging are those who strive for power."
About any piece of information, we can ask "What can I do with this?" (instrumental thinking) and "How does this help me understand the world and my place in it?" (relational thinking) Both questions are necessary. The first is needed to make the world a better place. The second is needed to deepen our relationships to each other. If we only ask the first question, our conception of what it means to make the world better remains shallow, because it is only for ourselves. We need a relational understanding to deliver on the promise of real improvement, to make the world better for all of us. Relational understanding says that the manufacture of electronics has contributed to human rights abuses and ecological degradation. Instrumental understanding says there are other ways that we might produce them to minimize such harms. If all I have is a relational understanding, then without instrumental ability I sit here and complain, but I am unable to do anything. If all I have is an instrumental understanding, I know what to do but I don’t see any reason to go out of my way to do it. Everyone has both of these capacities to some degree, but we get problems when they are out of balance. The world today is very capable of change, Western civilization has rapidly magnified the power of instrumental thinking, but because relational thinking doesn't grow in the same way it has struggled to keep pace with progress in other fields and maintain the interest of society in fostering the common good. Recall Jill Bolte Taylor's account of her left hemisphere stroke, which remains one of the most popular TED Talks ever given. She described how during her experience the stress related to her job and relationships was gone, her body was light and expansive, her spirit soared free, and she felt a sense of peace, beauty, and euphoria. She said: "I found Nirvana... I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be." Unlike other insights produced through the consumption of psychoactive drugs, the only explanation for her dramatic shift in perspective was changes to brain structure and functioning, which supports her conclusion that this capacity for a greater appreciation of relationships is available to all of us.
Mencius once argued that “People must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do.” Today we see the celebration of narrow and intolerant views that are unable to appreciate their own limitations, this has led to the decadence of modernity, the proliferation of parasitic forms of interaction, and manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes. McGilchrist wrote "If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the keynote. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss". Left hemisphere dominance transforms the world and the environments in which people live in such a way that such dominance is fostered and reinforced. We are advancing rapidly towards the complete suppression of the right hemisphere, if we have not already arrived, and there is no easy solution. People with healthy brains, who do appreciate broader contexts and thereby the conditions of their existence, do recognize bigger problems, are concerned to uphold the processes of nature and the traditions and ideals of the institutions in which they are participating and on which they are dependent, and do have an appreciation of their own limitations, need to appreciate not only the threat of people with malfunctioning brains, but their own potential." Gare concludes: "We can recover the depth of experience by overcoming the suppression of and reviving the right hemisphere and its world. It involves drawing back from the world, not to objectify it but to wonder at it, to experience its life and to be inspired to participate in this life. It is time for a new renaissance, wiser than all previous renaissances because of what we can learn from their achievements and subsequent decay, and from what we can now learn from other civilizations, their inspiring figures and renaissances. Hopefully, with this wisdom from the past we will be able to avoid a new Dark Age.”
Gary Goldberg weaved together McGilchrist and CS Peirce in a comment he made during a lively discussion at the 2021 Biosemiotics Gathering: "We have a left hemisphere and we have a right hemisphere. We have the left hemisphere to deal with the divided world, the division in the world, and the story of separation. But we also have another hemisphere. What's that for? What is it doing there? It's connecting us to the concrete reality. The concrete reality is one which we can't talk about because to talk you have to divide things up, you have to name things. But we feel it, we feel it's presence. The question is: Do you deny that feeling and do you say "Well, all there is is what I can see"? That's nominalism, that was what CS Peirce was very concerned about, the threat of nominalism, and that's where we are in the world right now. We're overrun by nominalism." Jeremy Lent also contrasted two different ways of looking at the world in his recent article that takes the case of Rex Tillerson, the epitome of someone under the spell of the left hemisphere's way of thinking. As McGilchrist made a point of noting, we need a "both/and" approach. We must both recognize the "music" of life and be capable of deploying the strategic interventions needed to harmonize our voices with the rest of nature. Climate change is not just an engineering problem, it is first and foremost a cultural problem. And though engineering will be part of the solution, more significantly a broader perspective that accounts for the relational dynamics, from cellular all the way up to ecological and geophysical processes, will be needed before those engineering solutions can be intelligently deployed. Lent calls this an "integrated consciousness" in his new book, The Web of Meaning.
Consider the 'toxic positivity' of the over confident, smug, and extremely self satisfied. In some ways, it's not so much an optimism per se, as an attempt to compensate for an insecurity and fear of vulnerability, long silences, and doubt, all of which can inspire terror if one lacks the ability to manage them in a healthy way. Confidence and satisfaction are indeed very desirable and good qualities. Doubt, too, is no less valuable (far more than is appreciated in consumer culture). But the denial of what Jung called the 'shadow', the unknown, leads to a willful, peculiar 'ignorance of ignorance'. And those thus afflicted tend to objectify other people in a uniquely damaging way. All this gets carried out on the edge of conscious awareness, so the damage it causes is usually not intentional, strictly speaking, and the specific origin of the interpersonal strife it generates often goes unnoticed by them, and thus unresolved, lingering in the background of social interactions. It also persists because it can be an adaptive illusion, in the same way that Western culture has persisted in objectifying nature. Though these are both ultimately maladaptive, inflexible, and prevent the possibility of psychological growth and transformation, they compensate for that loss with certain temporary functional advantages for persisting within the current regime or developmental phase. Whether or not mental and emotional flexibility or rigidity is a more appropriate response over the short term for any given situation depends on the context, and unfortunately due to the limitations of bounded rationality that cannot be fully known. Nonetheless, over the long term it seems preferable to maintain a flexible affective disposition, informed by a broad perspective, to allow easier access to a more global optima. One should avoid a narrow worldview, whether positive or negative, even if it may permit the psychologically protective illusion of objective certainty and provide some functional advantages for reaching a local optima. How can one make this choice however, if these processes all operate on the edge of conscious deliberation? Value an education that teaches how to work with doubt and uncertainty as essential tools. A supportive environment that exposes one to a diversity of perspectives and complex social interactions can also go a long way. Both of these encourage a flexible and resilient mental outlook, a self-reflective awareness of how the world consists of "partial views upon itself, seen from within", as Rovelli and Smolin might put it. All of us are trapped, in a way, by our circumstances in life. We have a little bit of freedom, but there are limitations. When we temporarily put ourselves into another person's shoes and adopt a different perspective, suspend judgment and become receptive to others, and ask questions with no predetermined response, that's what allows us to really see and be flexible. It can be a superpower."