The Conceptual Conditions of Ruin

Civilisational decline begins in the brain

‘Cultural barriers reflect that in the UK, 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. Racist colonial legacies that frame nature as a ‘white space’ create further barriers, suggesting that people of colour are not legitimate users of green spaces.’

-Wildlife and Countryside Link, November 2023

To be alive in Britain in the mid-21st century is to constantly be exposed to the half-baked opinions of half-educated people who purport to have expertise; it is to be relentlessly confronted with debased and incoherent ideas. This takes its toll - it has a large, cumulative, demoralising effect on society to be force-fed a diet of intellectual gruel. And it is suggestive that we have a very bleak future in store, because it indicates that we are in the grip of a way of thinking - which Iain McGilchrist recently called ‘deluded’ - that can lead us nowhere but down.

This was brought home to me viscerally by a recent news story concerning Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), a ‘coalition’ of conservation and environmental charities and other such organisations, which includes some of the biggest and most familiar names in the charitable sector - Greenpeace, the National Trust, the RSPB, the WWF, etc. WCL submitted a written response to a call for evidence issued back in November 2023 by a group of MPs (the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race & Community) on the subject of ‘Racism and the Environmental Emergency’. For whatever reason (a slow news day, perhaps), this response was dug up by journalists last week and paraded as being an accusation that the British countryside is a racist, colonial white space, or words to that effect; outrage has, entirely predictably, followed.

You can read the document in question here. It is important to say that the WCL has since issued a statement calling the news reporting a ‘misrepresentation’ and pointing out that the document was only signed by 11 out of a total of 82 organisations represented by the Link. It is hard to know how to interpret this - it could be that the 11 organisations in question genuinely went off on a ‘frolic of their own’ in submitting the evidence, but it could be that they were actually representing the WCL as a whole and are now being thrown under a bus by the bigger member organisations who are embarrassed by the story. Whatever is the truth of the matter, it is I think the case that there is a bit of exaggeration going on in the news reports: the document doesn’t actually label the British countryside ‘a racist, colonial white space’. But acknowledging that it is an exaggeration shouldn’t cause us to overlook the very important fact that the WCL’s submission is still appalling drivel.

Before explaining why, let me get one major caveat out of the way. I have close family members who are not white. Generally speaking they do not encounter racism in their daily lives. But the main exceptions have always been on visits to the countryside (actually, specifically the Welsh countryside, where on one occasion the family was indeed memorably pelted with rocks by a gang of youths). I also happen to know a black person who was beaten up in rural Cumbria simply for not being white. So I do not want to be read here as denying what to me is plainly evident - there are actually some racists in rural Britain and sometimes they can be violent. It goes without saying that this is bad. And in drawing attention to this issue the WCL does have a point. One shouldn’t allow oneself to be blinded by the fog of the culture war on this.

The problem, then, is not that the WCL suggested - and this is only one of several themes in the document - that non-white people can feel put off from going into the countryside for fear of being the target of racist comments or even violence, and that this in turn can have an impact on their health, because walking in green spaces undoubtedly is good for you physically, mentally and (the WCL don’t use this word, of course) spiritually. This would I think be a huge oversimplification but could, if you squint at it, be considered a justifiable contribution to public debate.

The problem is the utterly bogus theoretical framework within which that contribution is made. Let me repeat the quotation from the start of this substack, taken from section f of the document in question:

Cultural barriers reflect that in the UK, 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. Racist colonial legacies that frame nature as a ‘white space’ create further barriers, suggesting that people of colour are not legitimate users of green spaces.

You can imagine the intended effect of this paragraph. The reader (a Member of Parliament, let’s not forget), clearly, is supposed to furrow his brow, nod sagely, and say to himself, ‘Ah, yes, the embedding of cultural values, racist colonial legacies - a very important set of issues to deal with.’ And, of course, he is then supposed to continue, ‘It’s a good job the WCL exists and I had better take it and its ideas seriously and perhaps bung some public money its way.’

What he is not supposed to do is to spend any time thinking about it, because if he did, he would quickly realise what bunk it is. What on earth does it mean to say that ‘white British cultural values’ have been ‘embedded into the design and management of green spaces’? (Doesn’t this just mean that, as it is inescapably the case that the British countyside was created by British people, it is closely entwined with British identity in the same way that the Japanese countryside is closely entwined with Japanese identity and the Indian countryside is closely entwined with Indian identity, and so on and so forth?) What on earth are ‘white British cultural values’ to begin with and what do they have to do with the countryside? (Is the author suggesting that non-white people can’t enjoy or comprehend the understated beauty of the British countryside on the basis of their being the wrong race?) How do ‘racist colonial legacies’ frame nature as a ‘white space’? (I would have said that if anything it was the complete opposite: wasn’t one of the main themes of colonial discourse that colonial subjects were unsophisticated nature-dwellers who needed educated Europeans to help organise their societies? And more to the point, how is the British countryside beholden to a ‘colonial legacy’ except perhaps in respect of the Anglo-Saxons or Romans?) It is, in short, a tissue of ill-thought-out and unexplained assertions that the reader is required to take seriously just because the person scrawling them on the page has a tendentious claim to being an ‘expert’ of some kind.

The problem, then, is not that the WCL were calling the countryside ‘racist’ (they weren’t); and it isn’t that they were drawing attention to the fact that rural racism is actually a problem (it is). It is that they were dressing up their claims in a shroud of - forgive me for using the word, but it really is the most appropriate one to use - bullshit.

That it is bullshit is of course bad enough. And that it is taken at all seriously is worse: no society can have a bright future if its educated classes are this incapable of genuine thought. But it is indicative of a much more profound malaise, and here we need to spend a little bit of time with our friend Iain McGilchrist, who I earlier mentioned.

In The Master and His Emissary (2009), McGilchrist meticulously lays out for us the case for understanding the human brain - like all animal brains - as being divided between two hemispheres with two different jobs. In doing so, he debunks the old 1960s notion that the left side of the brain was the reliable, dependable, rational one, and that the right side was creative and spiritual and filled with mumbo-jumbo. The actual division concerns two different ways of attending to the world. The right side of the brain’s job is to attend to the whole - to be aware of the surrounding environment. The left side of the brain’s job is to attend to the singular - to manipulating and getting. To use McGilchrist’s example, a bird needs to use the left side of its brain to focus on tasks like grabbing a worm or placing a twig to make a nest. It needs to use the right side of its brain to be aware of the world around it so as to avoid predators and so forth. This is a necessary division of labour present in all multi-cellular life.

Humans of course do more than birds, but McGilchrist explains human thought and ultimately human culture and civilisation as being nonetheless informed by these two different modes of attending. What is important here, above all, is that this means we have two different ways of interfacing, as it were, with the world around us. Our left brains see the world as being composed of objects to be manipulated. Our right brains see it as a continuous whole - the word he often uses in later work is a ‘flow’. It follows that what the left brain likes is abstraction: it likes to break everything down into pieces which it can understand and deal with in the singular. What the right brain likes is to see everything as inter-connected and interrelated. Put simplistically, the former sees the whole as being less than the sum of the parts and vice versa.

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), and its signal contribution is in drawing our attention to a fundamental error that is at the heart of our politics and indeed our approach to everything, from dating to architecture to economics to parenthood. This error is our obsession with dealing with abstract ‘re-presentation’ rather than what actually ‘presences’ to us: dealing with the map, and thinking that it is the same thing as the terrain. From an academic paper McGilchrist once published:

The [right hemisphere] is better at seeing things as they are preconceptually—fresh, unique, embodied and as they ‘presence’ (Heidegger, anwesen) to us. The left, then, sees things as they are ‘re-presented,’ literally ‘present again’ after the fact, as already familiar abstractions or signs….

This is because it is the right hemisphere that experiences experience first, so to speak (being the one that is paying attention to the surroundings); it then passes what it experiences to the left hemisphere to sift through and identify what it thinks is useful or important, and the left brain does this on the basis of pre-existing categorisation (‘Yes, that’s a worm, I’ve eaten one of those before, I’ll grab it again’). 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.

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. And it describes our problem more fully than any other explanatory account I can think of: we, to repeat, increasingly encounter the world in our conscious state as a set of ‘re-presentations’ or ‘already familiar abstractions or signs’, not as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. And this leads us to the absolutely crass and stupid theoretical nonsense that characterises our public life, which increasingly resembles a hall of mirrors - all representation, no reality. We fall for absurd, ‘gotcha’ explanations that crumble like dust when exposed to the light: ‘Ah yes, the reason why non-white people don’t go on country walks is because white British cultural values have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces’. And we convince ourselves not only that these theoretical CliffsNotes are plausible, but they are the actual underlying reality: that it makes sense to think of the British countryside not as a vast, interconnected and interrelated whole, constantly in motion, constantly changing, constantly in a state of ungraspable and irreducible flow, but as something that can simply be understood straightforwardly on the basis of ‘white British cultural values and racist colonial legacy’.

Michael Oakeshott, in his essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ (also absolutely critical in understanding our predicament), long ago identified the same problem. When people are poorly educated, disconnected from their traditions and heritage, and put in charge, they lack the ability to make decisions based on the the accumulated cultural wisdom of their ancestry. And they therefore, to use his term, have to resort to ‘cribs’ (in the sense of short-hand copies of great works) - they don’t really know or understand anything, so they become particularly vulnerable to the pat answers of charlatans and the debased interpretations of the work of serious thinkers. How to actually introduce, and include, non-white people into the glory and wonder of the British countryside - a true cradle of civilisation if ever there was one - is an important question and a great task, but the answer is utterly beyond those who purport to solve it; instead all they can do is scrabble about for a ready-made idea that sounds fancy enough to look like expertise. ‘Blah blah cultural values, blah blah colonial legacy - that’ll do.’ To repeat: they live in the map, and mistake it for the terrain. And they are therefore incapable of acting in a sensible or useful way.

A society in the grip of this thinking cannot hope to go on in a civilised form. And in his recent public appearances McGilchrist has begun to sound increasingly apocalyptic, saying indeed that he thinks it ‘extremely unlikely that this civilisation will survive’. I know what he means. Everywhere around us we see the same set of problems, all deriving from the same fundamental error of dealing with representation and abstraction as though it is the underlying reality. At best this leaves us incapable of wise decision-making; generally it means that decision-making is actively bad.

The recent illustration par excellence is of course the response to Covid-19, in which our decision-makers at all turns seemed to think their mathematical models and theoretical solutions were more real than what was actually happening in society - and in which an obsession with trying to exert control over abstract, stylised ‘facts’ (‘case numbers’, deaths, the ‘R’ number and so on) consistently won out over taking decisions on the basis of what would be best for the whole. But one can see it across the whole piece, whether in the economy, education, culture, sport, crime - everywhere we see badly informed tinkering led by simplistic theory and based on abstract models; very rarely do we see anybody in a position of leadership trying to govern, to repeat, for the whole.

But to close on a more immediate note, the thing that concerns me most is that the problem is becoming so visible and salient even at the level of individual decision-making and in our personal lives. I happen to be writing these words on Valentine’s Day, at a time when the dating scene (thankfully I no longer have to worry about such matters) is surely the least appealing it has ever been. And the problems with it are all identifiably rooted in precisely the issue that I have been describing: the reduction of the whole to the parts; the confusion of understanding with the representation of ‘already familiar abstractions or signs’; the application of the map or ‘crib’ rather than the comprehension of the reality. Young people, it seems, are increasingly apt to see each other not in terms of the whole but in terms of what they represent - partly just their physical attributes of course, but partly also their character. For women, men seem by default to be presumed to be predatory or misogynistic; for men women by default seem to be presumed to be moneygrabbers or irredeemably ‘woke’. And for both parties, relationships are increasingly defined transactionally, as though a romantic or sexual partner is simply an object to be interacted with in order to gain some fleeting pleasurable sensation (the so-called ‘situationship’) or something even more grubby (money, etc.). We do not see people for who they are; we see them schematically on the basis of a pre-existing, abstracted set of categorisations and theories.

Without wishing to be too bleak, it is only a matter of time before this mentality begins to bleed into the family sphere, and one can already see this dark spectre emerging in the form of commercial surrogacy, divorce porn and the growing normalisation of parental resentment towards children. When the family itself becomes subject to left hemisphere thinking, that can only mean its death - and plummeting birth rates and youth anti-natalism are surely at least in part attributable to the phenomenon I am describing. To return to McGilchrist: it is highly unlikely that this civilisation will survive - and this is taking on an increasingly and poignantly literal meaning. How to respond, though, is something that will have to wait for future posts.