I am not so sure that these people are simply guilty of the wrong kind of thinking. Actually it is worse than that. They have abandoned the notion, which used to be accepted by everyone, that the earth's purpose is the good of humanity. That God "did not make it in vain; he made it to be lived in" as one of the Psalms says.
Those people live in cities. When they visit "the countryside" they fail to appreciate that it is just as much a built environment as are the cities. The countryside has been built by British farmers for the purpose of growing food.
The green "charities" see it, by contrast, as a Britain that is closer to how it naturally would be, or even should be, without the blight of mankind (sorry, humankind). That is why they champion "rewilding". In their hearts they would love to rewild the entire country. Their philosophy is fundamentally anti-human.
Of course, Britain was naturally a forested green hell, packed with wolves, bears and boars that were quite keen to rip humans to pieces. For details, see Little Red Riding Hood.
I think calling it anti-human in some ways gives it too much credit. The real problem is that they just aren't very well educated and don't know very much. But I think you are hitting on something important all the same - an atheistic society is actually one which does not value human life. CS Lewis had no problem understanding this!
This essay belongs in analogy magazine, David. May I cross-post?
I'm overjoyed to see this idea presented so articulately. We must do our best to spread the word on this insight. You have, without a doubt, put your finger on the very root of the trouble.
I'd like to call your attention to the issue of metaphor. You write:
"McGilchrist concedes at the end of his book that his account might be wrong and indeed may be entirely metaphorical, but even as metaphor, it is one of great power and insight."
Metaphor, etymologically and literalistically, refers to "carrying across": it bridges between the notion intended and the physical world. In other words, metaphor bridges between two worlds, the inner and the outer. So far, in communicating this idea to you, for example, I've used a continuous string of metaphors, in part because language is all metaphor, and the written word is further metaphor for the spoken word, but also because I've leveraged obvious metaphors like *bridges,* *worlds,* *inner and outer,* and *string.*
Despite the world of metaphors and conceits we each of us inhabit, we are unaware of the circumstances of our consciousness. In other words, we have no idea that our perception of the world is mediated by our imaginations. As Ted Hughes pointed out, this is why we must educate the imagination. At least then, as I see it, we might have a better chance of distinguishing phantasy from reality. As a consequence of the phenomena you mentioned in your article, folks are walking around in a dream, all the while thinking they're grounded in reality. (VR comes to mind as a decent analogy. Total Recall perhaps.)
What I'm getting at is that we ought to push back against this perception that something is "just a metaphor." Natural selection for instance is an amazing metaphor and a very productive conceit, but our society sees it as fact, final revelation, and true reality. When we understand language, we understand that metaphor is its life force and indeed the life force of all creativity.
As Jeffery Donaldson explains, another way of looking at metaphor is as one thing "put for" another. And in his book Missing Link he demonstrates how this same activity takes place in chemical bonds and in DNA replication. Each time we apply a new metaphor to explain metaphor, we learn something more about it, or we hit upon new avenues of research and experimentation. However, if we say some metaphors are just metaphors, and some ARE the One True Truth--we've lost sight of what metaphors are all about. . . their usefulness and productivity, as well as their limitations. Science in particular needs to come to grips with this problem. I believe that if this issue were taken seriously, it could have an enormous healing effect. Metaphor has the potential to reconcile the inner and outer worlds. It would also lead to great new scientific insights and advances.
I can't seem to quote this enough:
“The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.” - Ted Hughes "Myth and Education"
Are you familiar with the work of David Grove? His syncretic method for resolving traumatic memories is entirely based on metaphor. I have thought, in my shallow, generalist way, for some time, that the world needs an interdisciplinary conference on metaphoric truth. Bret Weinstein, author of a Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century, has been arguing, along the lines of David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral, and in opposition to Dawkins (who is one of his mentors), that faith is a metaphoric truth that has provided adaptive advantage, and that abandoning it has created catastrophe. The late Gerard Edelman, creator of the theory of Neural Darwinism and Nobel winner, was convinced that poetry (and thus metaphor) was the highest activity of the human brain. Frederick Turner, in his book on beauty and shame, identifies what he calls "neurocharms," which fueled human transformations. "...all of these charms involve a full cooperation between a biogenetic endowment and a cultural tradition that can activate and shape it. We all have neural organs adaptively designed for the purpose of language, but also require the environment of a specific natural language to awaken them....This biocultural feedback loop can generate extraordinarily various forms once it is established; but if the basic training in the charms is neglected, they will never show what they can do. An education that neglected them in the name of diversity or flexibility would leave the student bereft of magic and incapable of true cultural invention." (Turner, Beauty, 1991, 67-68) (and a free essay The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain and Time https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=60259) We can unequivocally say that we have reached that point in most education.
It is my sense that since Dr. McGilchrist has so many devotees, such a conference could be crowdfunded, and it could slip under the radar of prevailing and metastasizing ideologies, since poetry and metaphor and music seem like antimacassars, old-fashioned decorations, or are perceived as byproducts of a reductionist materialist neo-Darwinist evolution, and certainly not relevant to all the extinctions and crises. I am for practical, enactive, embodied experiments and prototypes, which are tried not because they can be predicted to succeed, or because they are inherently "right," but because we are all "starving in the belly of the whale" (Tom Waits) and because we are at risk of becoming Auden's ironic points of light flashing. Dr. McGilchrist has a bit of Tracy K. Smith's Bowie about him https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55520/dont-you-wonder-sometimes, and I think such a conference could be Wilbur's "small province haunted by the good" https://adraughtofvintage.com/blogger/2009%252F11%252Ficarium-mare-by-richard-wilbur.html/ and we could all wear "Metaphors Be With You" t-shirts!
Yes, please feel free to repost. I agree wholeheartedly with what you say here and I didn't want to create the impression metaphor is unimportant. I think the last line in The Master and His Emissary is indeed that metaphors are how we understand the world!
I'm afraid I've never heard of McGilchrist before but I can overlay my theory of why people behave the way they do.... I'm a Libertarian (formerly Conservative) and I have long thought the people on the Left only think about what immediately confronts them as opposed to the bigger picture. Take tax for example, the Left are obsessed with redistribution (allegedly) and therefore raising taxes for 'those who can afford it'. They never seem to learn from people's actual behaviour faced with increasing tax rates. It is beyond doubt that the very wealthy respond in kind to increased tax rates by taking action to reduce their exposure. This is just one of many examples I could use but the common theme is to focus on the immediate (and hopefully play to the crowd) rather than looking at the 'whole'. Interesting that McGilchrist identifies left and right brain!
Another good example of focusing on models as opposed to reality is in the sphere of climate change. Despite decades of failed predictions based on modelled outcomes, the Green Blob continues to rely on fantasy as opposed to reality.
Footnote: I disagree that the countryside and those who live in it are racist despite your anecdotes. The countryside is inhabited by individuals some of which will have thoughts that you and me disagree with (as all society does). Any suggestion that this makes it racist I think begs the question, compared to what? I do actually see quite a bit of hatred towards groups based on ethnicity these days, especially on TV. Interestingly they are never expressed by someone with low levels of melanin and it always appears OK to promote these views. If we compare the UK to say other countries (pick any from the middle east), Japan, Nigeria, China we compare well. We compare particularly well to other European countries (see Being Black in the EU) and the ' 'Sewell Report' suggested things are going well for minorities (obvs everyone can do more).
Anyone who thinks the countryside is racist thinks everything is racist.
The countryside neither is, nor isn’t racist - that’s the point I wanted to get across. It’s an irreducible whole. But, as I also wanted to explain, I do know that there are racists in it. I’ve met some and had some of them throw stones at my family members.
I never use the term racist, it’s a weaponised shitlib shut up word. I prefer ingroup preference. Some are so prejudiced in favour of their own group that they resort to violence. Is this good or bad? Depends on your perspective I suppose, certainly it can be protective to the group, keeping out those who are different. The fact that elites have shut down those who complain about colonisation of previously indigenous British spaces show how powerful this ingroup preference is and how much social pressure needs to be deployed to counter it.
I have not read Mcgilchrist (another for the reading list?) but from your account here I am somewhat doubtful that the neurological basis is a difference of left and right brain; far more reasonable would be a distinction between brainstem, Cerebellum and Cerebrum.
But the overall argument is close to my own thinking: we inhabit too much a virtual world of our own making, shadows and abstractions.
I have only just come across this wide ranging essay (via Substack Reads) and am particularly interested in your flagging of certain crass attempts to 'politically correct' the British Countryside which have long been a bugbear of mine.... and something I have written about in the past (although not on my Substack). Two separate kinds of nonsense:
1) 'the countryside is racist' pitch. This one is just an ignorant overgrown schoolboy virtue-signalling posture ....a hmm let me see now, what ELSE can I decide is 'racist' and make myself feel really SJW? It is so up-itself as to be almost funny.
2) the countryside needs to be more 'Environmentally Friendly'. This one is equally ignorant but more superficially plausible and more insidious. It chimes with crass pseudo-radical fashion despite the fact (as one of the comments has pointed out) that what makes the English countryside so distinctively beautiful is precisely it's man-made character. I published an essay on this very theme a few years back which l would like to send you.
As regards the broader political philosophical themes in your essay, these are the very things that I write about in my Slouching Towards Bethlehem 'stack.
(I'm writing this late and will expand on my comments tomorrow)
As I said elswhere, urban, educated, 'elite' people by and large hate and fear the countryside, and the self-reliant yeomanry who inhabit it. This is what the whole 'rewilding' thing is really all about: a kind of class war perpetrated by people who naturally despise the notion of a landholding, independent, autonomous population.
Yes that is certainly part of it but I think that - in addition to this urban/rural one - there are also Age and Class dimensions. Middle class people of my generation (even city-dwellers) genrally have a love of the British countryside (at least in its Miss Marple sense) whereas younger generations (of all social classes) have been so steeped in the relentless "everywhere on earth is more interesting than dull old Britain" and enviro-warrior narratives that the city dwellers among them have hardly ever holidayed in their own country. And with the invention of the satnav they literally know bugger all even about their own nation's geography.
This is the essay I mentioned previously: https://countrysquire.co.uk/2019/08/16/englands-green-pleasant-wilderness/ It was triggered by my frustration at the huge damage ivy infestation is doing to our our native deciduous trees. (I understand of course that, with so few people now working the land, there is not much that can realistically be done about (other than by voluntary tree-lover corps) but it is the ignorant indifference of RHS-type 'experts' to the problem that gets to me.)
Really great piece, thank you. I can only hope the powers that be haven't actually planned things with the intention of the potential destruction you (via McGilchrist) envisage. They surely don't possess that level of subtlety, one hopes. And, wait till you get to The Matter with Things by McGilchrist. I'm only part way through, but so far, a wonderful development out of The Master and his Emmisary.
I was about to ask if you've read TMTW yet! It's really good - especially when he expands on 'flow', and of course I love his conclusion (that we need a 'sense of the sacred' if we are to understand the world aright). His work is very important for my own research.
I reached here from the Daily Skeptic--great essay. These delusions proliferate here in America too. In Detroit, where I am, (after living most of my life in California), despite 6 months of winter, no sidewalks, lead in the water, rust belt particulates in the air, poverty, a once-almost-transcended racism (purposively)resurgent, globalists are putting in bike lanes to capitalize on the ostensible transformation of "the Motor City" to "sustainability." This is utterly untethered from what is real and no doubt based on abstract models and goals and agendas. We may need to return to the mythic. My thought is to lead the revolution from the park near me, astride the back of a white tailed buck, a helmet and armor fashioned of hornets' nests, and swarms around me. Only half-joking lol.
Great comment. It’s amazing how wherever you go it’s the same story. The people largely want one thing; the elite want to foist something else on them. This doesn’t end well…
Sorry for the long writings, but I totally agree with, McGilchrist’s book is among the most important that I have ever read (and I don’t know anybody who has read it who does not value it as highly as I do).
Love your description of Iain McGilchrist's understanding of the human brain,
And when you stated, "Our problem is that our thinking has become dominated by the left hemisphere, so we get stuck at the level of ‘re-presentation’ or ‘already familiar abstractions or signs’; we’ve lost the habit of re-embedding the ‘re-presentation’ back within the right hemisphere’s much richer and more complete perspective on the world. We are stuck in a web of theory, then, disconnected from reality."
It made me think of the Jung quote in this manner with definitions added in brackets,
I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God (Right Hemisphere, The Whole, Reality, The Whole entirety of the universe) consciously, for, if we do not, something else (Left Hemisphere, a representation, an abstraction) is made God.
Consider the popular religious concept of “submission to God.” It makes a great deal of sense. To submit to God is to submit to reality, to Nature. To obey the system and let it operate. To establish God as ”sovereign over everything” is to admit that reality, Nature, the Universe, is king. We have no metaphysical power over the structure of reality.
Looking at things from a universal perspective, there’s a very real sense in which your life is not your own. It’s God’s; it’s Nature’s. What happens in your life is not ultimately controlled by you, but rather by greater forces outside of yourself.
In this sense, I can agree with religious people when they claim,
“Western culture needs to submit to God!”
Western culture does need to acknowledge the existence of objective reality and live in accordance with it. Perhaps when theologians say “humans should live by God’s law”, they’re really saying “humans should not pretend they live in an alternative universe; they should live by the laws of Nature and accept reality as it is.”
This perspective also gives me a comprehensible understanding of “Satan.” Instead of being a really bad supernatural person, he might be the personification of non-reality, falsehood, or rebellion against reality.
Imagine we constructed a story about God (reality) versus Satan (falsehood), where both God and Satan were people. We could talk about how seductive Satan is, how tempting lies can be, and how deep delusions run in the human psychology. We could talk about the fundamental arrogance of Satan – the tendency for humans to vociferously proclaim they have the truth when they don’t. We could tell stories about how “listening to Satan” leads to unhappiness, since in the real world, lies and delusions end up harming people.
With such stories, I would end up advising the same thing as my Christian friends: stay away from Satan! God is what you need! And we could translate this rationally as, “Stay away from lies and delusions! Truth and reality is what you need!”
Furthermore, I often heard stories in my youth about the burning hatred that Satan has for God. Well, understanding God as reality and Satan as non-reality, I actually see this story play out in people. Humans that are living in delusion have an extreme hatred for anything true – even the concept of truth. Similarly, humans that are doing really bad things – think the Epstein sex ring – do not want the truth exposed. They have a strong preference for darkness and a fear of the light, so to speak.
After hearing stories about God and Satan for so many years, and never quite grasping them, it’s stunning to see them suddenly make sense by simply translating “God” as “reality” or “existence.”
Also this describes the points you make as well,
McGilchrist’s diagnosis of our present societal everything crisis is that it is due to widespread left-brain hyperdominance. The primacy of a materialist, reductionist worldview at the same time as an ascendant obsession with abstraction1; the mania for hyper-regulating every aspect of human existence through the managerial class’s endlessly restrictive permissions system; the lack of psychological nuance in public discourse, which has largely degenerated into angry partisans shouting slogans at one another; the robotic implacability of state bureaucracy, which grinds through senseless policies long after it has become obvious that they are useless or even counterproductive; the refusal to reconsider theories in light of new evidence, and indeed the refusal to recognize that disconfirming evidence even exists;
None of this widespread idiocy would matter, of course, if we weren't already infected with the disease of 'government': the majority of people accept (because they vote for it) that every tiny aspect of our lives, work, culture and all our activities and social interactions should be micromanaged by 'Government'.
True, but this suggests the two things are related - the need for micromanagement by government actually follows from the idiocy itself, and is a feature of it.
I could not agree more with your critique of abstract concepts that obscure reality. May I suggest however that Iain McGilchrist has proposed a neurological explanation for cognitive phenomena which can perhaps be more parsimoniously explained ...? https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book
Not wishing to put words in his mouth, he at various stages heavily implies that the two things aren't really extricable but that the neurology actually comes after the cognition, as it were - the dominance of the left brain actually follows from how we think, not vice versa. So you might find there's no disagreement.
My thesis, in brief, is that the sequelae of literacy - abstraction, fixity and reduced emotional tonality - have introduced significant distortions in our understanding. They could also have lead to neurological change, so indeed - chicken, egg etc. Certainly in terms of problem and prognosis we are all (three) in accord ...
Brilliant. Thank you, David. Also, perhaps one of the original and worst 'left-sided' Lie: that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming / climate crisis so must be reduced to net zero i.e. industrialized and developing countries must deindustrialize. The lie based on computer models drawn up deliberately to show 'human fingerprints', global warming. When originally they (e.g.the UNEP) just want to reduce the numbers of ordinary people and promote a death cult.
"it is White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces, and into society’s expectations of how people should be engaging with them." This means that the conservation of nature is "toxic whiteness" and that it's acceptable, especially for non-whites, to litter, pollute, cause forest fires, harvest & hunt protected species, and introduce invasive species.
1. I think there must be dangers in paying as much attention to wokish drivel as some of us do. If you hear enough of it, perhaps you start speaking it yourself. How else to explain the following from David McGrogan?
"How to actually introduce, and include, non-white people into the glory and wonder of the British countryside is an important question and a great task".
Even that "to actually ... something or other" seems to me a bad sign.
2. If you take Occam's razor to all the references to McGilchrist and the left and right hemispheres of our brains in this article, what's lost?
Don't be so touchy. It's a fair question whether you needed to talk about right and left hemispheres of the brain in order to say what you had to say about the countryside and racism. It's not only not self-evident that we had to wait for McGilchrist's book to come out in order to talk about such things, it's not even plausible.
I might not be worth arguing with but how about Coleridge ... "talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar ... contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter"? Or, as to say, where the decline begins is not in the brain but the mind. Preferring to speak of the weighable, measurable brain and its activities, as if that were a more accurate way of speaking of the mind and its, is itself not just a sign but an example of civilisational decline.
The point McGilchrist consistently makes is that what we see in the brain follows from what is happening the mind. The problem is not that the left brain has become dominant. It's that certain ways of thinking have become dominant and these manifest themselves in, and are associated with, the left brain. The position you're critiquing is not McGilchrist's.
So McGilchrist would agree (his mental event would be?) that if your subject is not a neurological one but racism-in-the-countryside, you can stick to what's happening in the mind, that is, what people say, think and mean; and that to bring in what might be happening in the brain at the same time is unnecessary and perhaps. even, a distraction?
I am not so sure that these people are simply guilty of the wrong kind of thinking. Actually it is worse than that. They have abandoned the notion, which used to be accepted by everyone, that the earth's purpose is the good of humanity. That God "did not make it in vain; he made it to be lived in" as one of the Psalms says.
Those people live in cities. When they visit "the countryside" they fail to appreciate that it is just as much a built environment as are the cities. The countryside has been built by British farmers for the purpose of growing food.
The green "charities" see it, by contrast, as a Britain that is closer to how it naturally would be, or even should be, without the blight of mankind (sorry, humankind). That is why they champion "rewilding". In their hearts they would love to rewild the entire country. Their philosophy is fundamentally anti-human.
Of course, Britain was naturally a forested green hell, packed with wolves, bears and boars that were quite keen to rip humans to pieces. For details, see Little Red Riding Hood.
I think calling it anti-human in some ways gives it too much credit. The real problem is that they just aren't very well educated and don't know very much. But I think you are hitting on something important all the same - an atheistic society is actually one which does not value human life. CS Lewis had no problem understanding this!
This essay belongs in analogy magazine, David. May I cross-post?
I'm overjoyed to see this idea presented so articulately. We must do our best to spread the word on this insight. You have, without a doubt, put your finger on the very root of the trouble.
I'd like to call your attention to the issue of metaphor. You write:
"McGilchrist concedes at the end of his book that his account might be wrong and indeed may be entirely metaphorical, but even as metaphor, it is one of great power and insight."
Metaphor, etymologically and literalistically, refers to "carrying across": it bridges between the notion intended and the physical world. In other words, metaphor bridges between two worlds, the inner and the outer. So far, in communicating this idea to you, for example, I've used a continuous string of metaphors, in part because language is all metaphor, and the written word is further metaphor for the spoken word, but also because I've leveraged obvious metaphors like *bridges,* *worlds,* *inner and outer,* and *string.*
Despite the world of metaphors and conceits we each of us inhabit, we are unaware of the circumstances of our consciousness. In other words, we have no idea that our perception of the world is mediated by our imaginations. As Ted Hughes pointed out, this is why we must educate the imagination. At least then, as I see it, we might have a better chance of distinguishing phantasy from reality. As a consequence of the phenomena you mentioned in your article, folks are walking around in a dream, all the while thinking they're grounded in reality. (VR comes to mind as a decent analogy. Total Recall perhaps.)
What I'm getting at is that we ought to push back against this perception that something is "just a metaphor." Natural selection for instance is an amazing metaphor and a very productive conceit, but our society sees it as fact, final revelation, and true reality. When we understand language, we understand that metaphor is its life force and indeed the life force of all creativity.
As Jeffery Donaldson explains, another way of looking at metaphor is as one thing "put for" another. And in his book Missing Link he demonstrates how this same activity takes place in chemical bonds and in DNA replication. Each time we apply a new metaphor to explain metaphor, we learn something more about it, or we hit upon new avenues of research and experimentation. However, if we say some metaphors are just metaphors, and some ARE the One True Truth--we've lost sight of what metaphors are all about. . . their usefulness and productivity, as well as their limitations. Science in particular needs to come to grips with this problem. I believe that if this issue were taken seriously, it could have an enormous healing effect. Metaphor has the potential to reconcile the inner and outer worlds. It would also lead to great new scientific insights and advances.
I can't seem to quote this enough:
“The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.” - Ted Hughes "Myth and Education"
You might find this interesting:
https://analogymagazine.substack.com/p/a-bridge-is-a-lie-how-metaphor-does
Are you familiar with the work of David Grove? His syncretic method for resolving traumatic memories is entirely based on metaphor. I have thought, in my shallow, generalist way, for some time, that the world needs an interdisciplinary conference on metaphoric truth. Bret Weinstein, author of a Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century, has been arguing, along the lines of David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral, and in opposition to Dawkins (who is one of his mentors), that faith is a metaphoric truth that has provided adaptive advantage, and that abandoning it has created catastrophe. The late Gerard Edelman, creator of the theory of Neural Darwinism and Nobel winner, was convinced that poetry (and thus metaphor) was the highest activity of the human brain. Frederick Turner, in his book on beauty and shame, identifies what he calls "neurocharms," which fueled human transformations. "...all of these charms involve a full cooperation between a biogenetic endowment and a cultural tradition that can activate and shape it. We all have neural organs adaptively designed for the purpose of language, but also require the environment of a specific natural language to awaken them....This biocultural feedback loop can generate extraordinarily various forms once it is established; but if the basic training in the charms is neglected, they will never show what they can do. An education that neglected them in the name of diversity or flexibility would leave the student bereft of magic and incapable of true cultural invention." (Turner, Beauty, 1991, 67-68) (and a free essay The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain and Time https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=60259) We can unequivocally say that we have reached that point in most education.
It is my sense that since Dr. McGilchrist has so many devotees, such a conference could be crowdfunded, and it could slip under the radar of prevailing and metastasizing ideologies, since poetry and metaphor and music seem like antimacassars, old-fashioned decorations, or are perceived as byproducts of a reductionist materialist neo-Darwinist evolution, and certainly not relevant to all the extinctions and crises. I am for practical, enactive, embodied experiments and prototypes, which are tried not because they can be predicted to succeed, or because they are inherently "right," but because we are all "starving in the belly of the whale" (Tom Waits) and because we are at risk of becoming Auden's ironic points of light flashing. Dr. McGilchrist has a bit of Tracy K. Smith's Bowie about him https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55520/dont-you-wonder-sometimes, and I think such a conference could be Wilbur's "small province haunted by the good" https://adraughtofvintage.com/blogger/2009%252F11%252Ficarium-mare-by-richard-wilbur.html/ and we could all wear "Metaphors Be With You" t-shirts!
Yes, please feel free to repost. I agree wholeheartedly with what you say here and I didn't want to create the impression metaphor is unimportant. I think the last line in The Master and His Emissary is indeed that metaphors are how we understand the world!
McGilchrist's work seems to explain the paradox of stupidity rising in line with education. Big fan here.
I'm afraid I've never heard of McGilchrist before but I can overlay my theory of why people behave the way they do.... I'm a Libertarian (formerly Conservative) and I have long thought the people on the Left only think about what immediately confronts them as opposed to the bigger picture. Take tax for example, the Left are obsessed with redistribution (allegedly) and therefore raising taxes for 'those who can afford it'. They never seem to learn from people's actual behaviour faced with increasing tax rates. It is beyond doubt that the very wealthy respond in kind to increased tax rates by taking action to reduce their exposure. This is just one of many examples I could use but the common theme is to focus on the immediate (and hopefully play to the crowd) rather than looking at the 'whole'. Interesting that McGilchrist identifies left and right brain!
Another good example of focusing on models as opposed to reality is in the sphere of climate change. Despite decades of failed predictions based on modelled outcomes, the Green Blob continues to rely on fantasy as opposed to reality.
Footnote: I disagree that the countryside and those who live in it are racist despite your anecdotes. The countryside is inhabited by individuals some of which will have thoughts that you and me disagree with (as all society does). Any suggestion that this makes it racist I think begs the question, compared to what? I do actually see quite a bit of hatred towards groups based on ethnicity these days, especially on TV. Interestingly they are never expressed by someone with low levels of melanin and it always appears OK to promote these views. If we compare the UK to say other countries (pick any from the middle east), Japan, Nigeria, China we compare well. We compare particularly well to other European countries (see Being Black in the EU) and the ' 'Sewell Report' suggested things are going well for minorities (obvs everyone can do more).
Anyone who thinks the countryside is racist thinks everything is racist.
As ever, a good article and good read. 👍
The countryside neither is, nor isn’t racist - that’s the point I wanted to get across. It’s an irreducible whole. But, as I also wanted to explain, I do know that there are racists in it. I’ve met some and had some of them throw stones at my family members.
I never use the term racist, it’s a weaponised shitlib shut up word. I prefer ingroup preference. Some are so prejudiced in favour of their own group that they resort to violence. Is this good or bad? Depends on your perspective I suppose, certainly it can be protective to the group, keeping out those who are different. The fact that elites have shut down those who complain about colonisation of previously indigenous British spaces show how powerful this ingroup preference is and how much social pressure needs to be deployed to counter it.
I part company with you on this. When you've seen racism you know it, and I'm afraid 'ingroup preference' doesn't capture it.
I have not read Mcgilchrist (another for the reading list?) but from your account here I am somewhat doubtful that the neurological basis is a difference of left and right brain; far more reasonable would be a distinction between brainstem, Cerebellum and Cerebrum.
But the overall argument is close to my own thinking: we inhabit too much a virtual world of our own making, shadows and abstractions.
Definitely one for the reading list. The first third of the book fully justifies the neurological basis - it is very important.
I have only just come across this wide ranging essay (via Substack Reads) and am particularly interested in your flagging of certain crass attempts to 'politically correct' the British Countryside which have long been a bugbear of mine.... and something I have written about in the past (although not on my Substack). Two separate kinds of nonsense:
1) 'the countryside is racist' pitch. This one is just an ignorant overgrown schoolboy virtue-signalling posture ....a hmm let me see now, what ELSE can I decide is 'racist' and make myself feel really SJW? It is so up-itself as to be almost funny.
2) the countryside needs to be more 'Environmentally Friendly'. This one is equally ignorant but more superficially plausible and more insidious. It chimes with crass pseudo-radical fashion despite the fact (as one of the comments has pointed out) that what makes the English countryside so distinctively beautiful is precisely it's man-made character. I published an essay on this very theme a few years back which l would like to send you.
As regards the broader political philosophical themes in your essay, these are the very things that I write about in my Slouching Towards Bethlehem 'stack.
(I'm writing this late and will expand on my comments tomorrow)
As I said elswhere, urban, educated, 'elite' people by and large hate and fear the countryside, and the self-reliant yeomanry who inhabit it. This is what the whole 'rewilding' thing is really all about: a kind of class war perpetrated by people who naturally despise the notion of a landholding, independent, autonomous population.
Yes that is certainly part of it but I think that - in addition to this urban/rural one - there are also Age and Class dimensions. Middle class people of my generation (even city-dwellers) genrally have a love of the British countryside (at least in its Miss Marple sense) whereas younger generations (of all social classes) have been so steeped in the relentless "everywhere on earth is more interesting than dull old Britain" and enviro-warrior narratives that the city dwellers among them have hardly ever holidayed in their own country. And with the invention of the satnav they literally know bugger all even about their own nation's geography.
This is the essay I mentioned previously: https://countrysquire.co.uk/2019/08/16/englands-green-pleasant-wilderness/ It was triggered by my frustration at the huge damage ivy infestation is doing to our our native deciduous trees. (I understand of course that, with so few people now working the land, there is not much that can realistically be done about (other than by voluntary tree-lover corps) but it is the ignorant indifference of RHS-type 'experts' to the problem that gets to me.)
I have subscribed to you by the way.
Really great piece, thank you. I can only hope the powers that be haven't actually planned things with the intention of the potential destruction you (via McGilchrist) envisage. They surely don't possess that level of subtlety, one hopes. And, wait till you get to The Matter with Things by McGilchrist. I'm only part way through, but so far, a wonderful development out of The Master and his Emmisary.
I do own The Matter with Things but need to take a good run-up at it!
I was about to ask if you've read TMTW yet! It's really good - especially when he expands on 'flow', and of course I love his conclusion (that we need a 'sense of the sacred' if we are to understand the world aright). His work is very important for my own research.
When I have read it I will post a review, I think.
I reached here from the Daily Skeptic--great essay. These delusions proliferate here in America too. In Detroit, where I am, (after living most of my life in California), despite 6 months of winter, no sidewalks, lead in the water, rust belt particulates in the air, poverty, a once-almost-transcended racism (purposively)resurgent, globalists are putting in bike lanes to capitalize on the ostensible transformation of "the Motor City" to "sustainability." This is utterly untethered from what is real and no doubt based on abstract models and goals and agendas. We may need to return to the mythic. My thought is to lead the revolution from the park near me, astride the back of a white tailed buck, a helmet and armor fashioned of hornets' nests, and swarms around me. Only half-joking lol.
Great comment. It’s amazing how wherever you go it’s the same story. The people largely want one thing; the elite want to foist something else on them. This doesn’t end well…
The Mathematical models of the pandemic seem to be either too simple (exponential growth) or too complicated.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4kWbYlopN4
Sorry for the long writings, but I totally agree with, McGilchrist’s book is among the most important that I have ever read (and I don’t know anybody who has read it who does not value it as highly as I do).
Love your description of Iain McGilchrist's understanding of the human brain,
And when you stated, "Our problem is that our thinking has become dominated by the left hemisphere, so we get stuck at the level of ‘re-presentation’ or ‘already familiar abstractions or signs’; we’ve lost the habit of re-embedding the ‘re-presentation’ back within the right hemisphere’s much richer and more complete perspective on the world. We are stuck in a web of theory, then, disconnected from reality."
It made me think of the Jung quote in this manner with definitions added in brackets,
I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God (Right Hemisphere, The Whole, Reality, The Whole entirety of the universe) consciously, for, if we do not, something else (Left Hemisphere, a representation, an abstraction) is made God.
This was after also reading this article,
https://steve-patterson.com/understanding-god-as-nature-or-the-universe/
Submission, Satan, and Karma
Consider the popular religious concept of “submission to God.” It makes a great deal of sense. To submit to God is to submit to reality, to Nature. To obey the system and let it operate. To establish God as ”sovereign over everything” is to admit that reality, Nature, the Universe, is king. We have no metaphysical power over the structure of reality.
Looking at things from a universal perspective, there’s a very real sense in which your life is not your own. It’s God’s; it’s Nature’s. What happens in your life is not ultimately controlled by you, but rather by greater forces outside of yourself.
In this sense, I can agree with religious people when they claim,
“Western culture needs to submit to God!”
Western culture does need to acknowledge the existence of objective reality and live in accordance with it. Perhaps when theologians say “humans should live by God’s law”, they’re really saying “humans should not pretend they live in an alternative universe; they should live by the laws of Nature and accept reality as it is.”
This perspective also gives me a comprehensible understanding of “Satan.” Instead of being a really bad supernatural person, he might be the personification of non-reality, falsehood, or rebellion against reality.
Imagine we constructed a story about God (reality) versus Satan (falsehood), where both God and Satan were people. We could talk about how seductive Satan is, how tempting lies can be, and how deep delusions run in the human psychology. We could talk about the fundamental arrogance of Satan – the tendency for humans to vociferously proclaim they have the truth when they don’t. We could tell stories about how “listening to Satan” leads to unhappiness, since in the real world, lies and delusions end up harming people.
With such stories, I would end up advising the same thing as my Christian friends: stay away from Satan! God is what you need! And we could translate this rationally as, “Stay away from lies and delusions! Truth and reality is what you need!”
Furthermore, I often heard stories in my youth about the burning hatred that Satan has for God. Well, understanding God as reality and Satan as non-reality, I actually see this story play out in people. Humans that are living in delusion have an extreme hatred for anything true – even the concept of truth. Similarly, humans that are doing really bad things – think the Epstein sex ring – do not want the truth exposed. They have a strong preference for darkness and a fear of the light, so to speak.
After hearing stories about God and Satan for so many years, and never quite grasping them, it’s stunning to see them suddenly make sense by simply translating “God” as “reality” or “existence.”
Also this describes the points you make as well,
McGilchrist’s diagnosis of our present societal everything crisis is that it is due to widespread left-brain hyperdominance. The primacy of a materialist, reductionist worldview at the same time as an ascendant obsession with abstraction1; the mania for hyper-regulating every aspect of human existence through the managerial class’s endlessly restrictive permissions system; the lack of psychological nuance in public discourse, which has largely degenerated into angry partisans shouting slogans at one another; the robotic implacability of state bureaucracy, which grinds through senseless policies long after it has become obvious that they are useless or even counterproductive; the refusal to reconsider theories in light of new evidence, and indeed the refusal to recognize that disconfirming evidence even exists;
You might find this recent interview with McGilchrist interesting, as he is I think touching on the themes you raise here: https://youtu.be/P35P74OUARw?si=DH3goYb8Vrvz-BYr
Brilliant, Thanks for that every time I listen to and interview with Iain McGilchrist he brings more nuance and understanding of his ideas.
None of this widespread idiocy would matter, of course, if we weren't already infected with the disease of 'government': the majority of people accept (because they vote for it) that every tiny aspect of our lives, work, culture and all our activities and social interactions should be micromanaged by 'Government'.
True, but this suggests the two things are related - the need for micromanagement by government actually follows from the idiocy itself, and is a feature of it.
I could not agree more with your critique of abstract concepts that obscure reality. May I suggest however that Iain McGilchrist has proposed a neurological explanation for cognitive phenomena which can perhaps be more parsimoniously explained ...? https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book
Not wishing to put words in his mouth, he at various stages heavily implies that the two things aren't really extricable but that the neurology actually comes after the cognition, as it were - the dominance of the left brain actually follows from how we think, not vice versa. So you might find there's no disagreement.
My thesis, in brief, is that the sequelae of literacy - abstraction, fixity and reduced emotional tonality - have introduced significant distortions in our understanding. They could also have lead to neurological change, so indeed - chicken, egg etc. Certainly in terms of problem and prognosis we are all (three) in accord ...
Brilliant. Thank you, David. Also, perhaps one of the original and worst 'left-sided' Lie: that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming / climate crisis so must be reduced to net zero i.e. industrialized and developing countries must deindustrialize. The lie based on computer models drawn up deliberately to show 'human fingerprints', global warming. When originally they (e.g.the UNEP) just want to reduce the numbers of ordinary people and promote a death cult.
"it is White British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces, and into society’s expectations of how people should be engaging with them." This means that the conservation of nature is "toxic whiteness" and that it's acceptable, especially for non-whites, to litter, pollute, cause forest fires, harvest & hunt protected species, and introduce invasive species.
Iain McGilchrist's book should really have been, The Master and HER Emissary".
https://thechaliceandtheflame.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-master-and-her-emissary.html
1. I think there must be dangers in paying as much attention to wokish drivel as some of us do. If you hear enough of it, perhaps you start speaking it yourself. How else to explain the following from David McGrogan?
"How to actually introduce, and include, non-white people into the glory and wonder of the British countryside is an important question and a great task".
Even that "to actually ... something or other" seems to me a bad sign.
2. If you take Occam's razor to all the references to McGilchrist and the left and right hemispheres of our brains in this article, what's lost?
3. Why does your comment deserve a thoughtful response?
Don't be so touchy. It's a fair question whether you needed to talk about right and left hemispheres of the brain in order to say what you had to say about the countryside and racism. It's not only not self-evident that we had to wait for McGilchrist's book to come out in order to talk about such things, it's not even plausible.
I might not be worth arguing with but how about Coleridge ... "talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar ... contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter"? Or, as to say, where the decline begins is not in the brain but the mind. Preferring to speak of the weighable, measurable brain and its activities, as if that were a more accurate way of speaking of the mind and its, is itself not just a sign but an example of civilisational decline.
The point McGilchrist consistently makes is that what we see in the brain follows from what is happening the mind. The problem is not that the left brain has become dominant. It's that certain ways of thinking have become dominant and these manifest themselves in, and are associated with, the left brain. The position you're critiquing is not McGilchrist's.
So McGilchrist would agree (his mental event would be?) that if your subject is not a neurological one but racism-in-the-countryside, you can stick to what's happening in the mind, that is, what people say, think and mean; and that to bring in what might be happening in the brain at the same time is unnecessary and perhaps. even, a distraction?