The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a book published in 2009 by the polymath psychiatrist and philosopher Dr Iain McGilchrist. When I heard him speak at a day conference at the Royal Institution in London last year, it inspired me with the idea to set up the justbeautyportal blogsite.
I think it’s a seminal book that deals with the different ways in which the left and right hemispheres of the brain work – and how that affects the way we think and see. McGilchrist argues that for the last 300 years or more the world has been dominated by left brain, scientific and technical thinking.
This has led to outstanding material advances but also to a loss of human empathy and comprehension of our place in the natural world and our relation and responsibility to other living things.
So – I would urge you to buy this book. It’s a weighty tome. I skipped through the first half – a scientific analysis of the way the two brain hemispheres function. It’s above my intellectual paygrade. But I devoured the second half of the book – a cultural critique of recent centuries of western civilisation.
In particular as faith in traditional religion has declined, a gap has opened up for the way in which people can express a sense of what they find sacred and locate their moral values and feeling for the ultimate meaning and purpose of their lives. This may involve the use of myth, ritual, metaphor and other artistic modes.
McGilchrist gives us a broad brush criticism of western culture – and the excitement for me was seeing that it is possible for us to explore our inner values and our sense of mental or spiritual progress in a way that is not in conflict with science. Some vital aspects of thinking involve empathy, intuition, imagination, our bodies and our feelings.
He says we should be free to uphold the traditional human ideals of the good, the beautiful and the true without worrying that we are therefore superstitious or sentimental. And maybe at the same time as we pride ourselves on our rationality, we can also become more open to other kinds of truth, such as that of a “hysterical woman” (Cassandra who accurately foresaw disasters in the Greek myth!), or an indigenous person (dismissed as “savages” in Frazer’s Golden Bough), or even perhaps a difficult child, a mad person, or a relative with dementia. What are they actually expressing?
This broader way of thinking can be controversial in the scientific community. Is human consciousness unique and irreducible? Or will it one day be fully measured, analysed and predictable like any other physical process? Deep questions are raised about rival materialist and idealist views of reality. What follows is not strictly a review – but a vigorous debate with a scientist friend who takes a strong atheist position. The argument touches a live cultural nerve! I will call the speakers ARTIST(me) versus RATIONALIST.
In previous skirmishes with my RATIONALIST FRIEND, I had conceded that science gives us the best version of Objective truth; but I argued that the Subjective world of the human consciousness has its own kind of less precisely-defined truths, which are vital to us as humans because that is where we live and make our choices
MAY 19 RATIONALIST: (complaining that Iain McGilchrist has more recently given credence to panpsychists, who believe that everything in the universe down to the last electron is conscious. He says it’s a theory for which there is no evidence and it destroys the credibility of any scientist associated with it.)
I must admit that I am quite unhappy about the continuing concentration on Iain McGilchrist. It seems to me to be more than a bit cultish. Do you understand that he promotes panpsychism? That he also promotes outright pseudoscientists like XXXX? I have spent a lot of time listening to his channel and to his interviews with various podcast hosts (and unfortunately to sickeningly self-congratulatory and smug conversations with XXXX and others). I have done this because I want to hear a range of views rather than my own echo chamber and despite knowing that there is no scientific evidence for their views on panpsychism or complete idealism. I wonder if you have also taken the time to look at contradictory views?
You may be wondering why I keep raising the issue.
1/ As I understand it, the basis of the project is supposed to be about *truth*.
2/ It is supposed to be a website to be relied upon for objective assessments.
3/I have spent my life thus far as a scientist, I don’t want to be associated with pseudoscience, woolly thinking and woo.
4/ Or associated with or promote an idealist/pseudoscientific cult.
JUNE 23: ARTIST (me): (RATIONALIST has recommended Sean Carroll as a scientist whose views he endorses.)
I’ve had the briefest journalist’s kind of look at Sean Carroll. He believes that the laws of physics make it certain that God does not exist.
At the same time he believes that it is legitimate to talk about human beings having free will to make decisions – but it’s on a different level of meaning from the laws of science. Our free will cannot bust the laws of physics!
That seems eminently sensible to me – if not to later McGilchrist or some panpsychist friends. To me Panpsychism sounds like a rather attractive myth – no more than that.
In the Humanist movement an argument is going on about whether we just define ourselves as Atheists – a purely negative definition of who we are? Or do we say what we positively believe in – what moral principles we can agree on?
My novel The Manual that I have just signed off explores this territory – the status of any mythical beliefs we may have – and where and how we can find our values.
I personally don’t find the negative argument of The God Delusion [by Richard Dawkins] very interesting any more. For most educated people of any religion, that battle has been won.
We still tell our young children about Father Christmas – and our older ones about Robin Hood – doing his bit for the redistribution of wealth and power. At a certain age, we put away these childish things – but still enjoy a good film version.
JUNE 24 RATIONALIST: I think the website looks very professional and the project seems to be progressing very well. That said, as you know, I have serious reservations about my involvement with it.
About the comments still on the website with respect to Iain McGilchrist. I think that he draws conclusions which are well beyond his areas of expertise and he certainly reads far too much into his theses about the left/right brain. I guess you could say his first book was a “trade book” designed to increase his recognition and popularity. If that was all, I would shrug my shoulders and tut a little at the resultant development of a cult following. Unfortunately it isn’t all. Whilst I admit that I have not read his latest idealist tome (£50 in paperback) I have spent *many, many hours* listening to his sadly self-promoting web channel, his lectures, reviews of his interactions with a whole range of web hosts and his conversations with like-minded, often sycophantic, people. Hence I am familiar with both his views and his philosophy.
I find them very disturbing: from his flirtation with obvious pseudoscience (panpsychism) to his overt idealism, which I think encourages antiscience / antirealism and religiosity. I’m not surprised that McGilchrist is influential in your editorial group. Along with the (in my opinion asinine) Keats quote (try finding beauty in the truth of the holocaust or of a diagnosed cancer) it suits many people (along with Keats) to think that they have some superior understanding or creativity because they are ‘artistic’. Keats was a brilliant poet but sadly ignorant too.
The idea that scientists (people who are specifically trained in thinking critically) are somehow uncreative is both insulting and profoundly wrong. I would call our most precise scientific theories both beautiful and immensely creative. If you disagree, spending time studying the concepts and maths of general relativity and quantum field theory will disabuse you. The creative leaps and ingenuity are stunning.
As you know, I have spent much of my life engaged in trying to find aspects of truth, mostly in trying to understand the way the physical world operates via scientific investigation of the patterns of nature. Much of this work has been prosaic and painfully detailed, but the cumulative experience of daily interaction with natural forces and materials has left me with a profound belief/understanding of the indifference of the physical world to our subjective feelings, and with a critical awareness of our tendency towards unwarranted self-esteem and fantasy.
As you know I think that poetic naturalism is the most productive way to combine our best scientific and experiential understandings of the world. But even with this understanding we must acknowledge the primacy of the scientific underpinnings of reality from which all else emerges as time progresses and complexity increases.
The fashionable reemergence of idealism in philosophical circles concerns me in particular. It is strange that this could happen at a time when physicalist ideas are transforming the world and while traditional idealist philosophy (popular theology) is, as you said, dead. Maybe it is a result of panic at the recognition that the successes of physicalism are reducing the scope of philosophy to merely refining terms (which, in my opinion, was always the best use of philosophy 🙂
JUNE 24 ARTIST: The JustBeauty site is a digital magazine that will allow us to say what we can still believe in.
Surely there are more interesting things to say than “I don’t believe in something that doesn’t exist.” (God). Who does? Who knows what God even means any more? The ancient peoples in the Golden Bough didn’t think Gods were much different from certain charismatic, persuasive, powerful human beings.
Only much later, says James Frazer, did people think of Gods as being on an entirely different plane.
And what is the source of our moral values, for instance our sense that human and animal life should be preserved wherever possible and shouldn’t just be used or snuffed out as a means to an end? Surely that is something that is in our emotional makeup because we have an intuitive understanding that we are part of the natural world.
Without that connection maybe our lives start to lose meaning. It’s subjective but it’s also crucial.
JUNE 25: ARTIST CONTINUES: So thinking on last night about the McGilchrist debate, I guess the big question behind his later thought is the old chestnut: Does Life have a purpose? Does maybe the universe have a meaning – and a purpose of its own?
And maybe even beyond that – is the universe in fact a giant brain, which is struggling to articulate its thoughts with the help of clever life forms like us?
Personally I think it’s obvious that the answer to these questions is always No. For a scientist, I would think the response might be that these are simply meaningless questions, formed from anthropomorphic assumptions. Maybe even influenced by a monotheistic historical background which imagined a God who was entirely good.
A second question remains: should human beings have a purpose? Should a human being seek to give meaning to their life?
I think the answer to that one is yes. When we are young, that may well be pursuing a woke kind of meaning, where we campaign for an unrealistic vision of a perfectly fair world.
As we are older and more experienced, the meanings and purposes in our lives are much more complex, recognising contradictions and having a better idea of what the practical options are in the here and now.
But we strengthen ourselves by articulating our values and making common cause with other people when we can. We don’t want to live a lie.
And I guess if I meet a religious person who says God is Love and getting in touch with that spirit is helping me to be a better person, to be kinder to other people, I say good luck to them. As long as they are not harming anyone else, or removing science textbooks from schools, I would say they are free to create their own sense of purpose.
My own intuition is that life is not all about being good and kind – we live in a sort of human ecosystem of often competing predators. This means that we can only be good and kind some of the time, when the wind is in the right quarter.
JUNE 27 RATIONALIST: No, Sean Carrol does not say there is no God. He says that “God is not a good hypothesis” for explaining the world today. It once was, but with increasing knowledge it is now just a placeholder for ignorance.
With respect to purpose and morality, I think these are part of the human psyche as it has evolved. There is no need to invoke anything other than kinship, altruism, etc, in a creature with a profoundly complex brain capable of evaluation of potential future consequences of actions, in order to explain morality or purpose, or our wish for them.
With respect to McGilchrist. I have tried comprehensively over a longish period to point out the problems for me as a scientist with being associated with his idealist and pseudoscientific philosophy. I have similar reservations about the pseudoscience from XXXX, XXXX, XXXX…
There are a great many similar persons who produce unjustified and fantastical claims for popular consumption *but those people are not highlighted on the website*. McGilchrist is.
Moreover, he is highlighted as an authority, as though he was not pushing pseudoscientific / religious/ panpsychist nonsense. In contrast, the website suggests he has provided the profound, radical, important ideas which underlie the project and are, by implication, ideas which should be sought out and taken seriously as beautiful (and true?) by readers.
JUNE 30 ARTIST: I have been pondering your email since I ended my 3-days with no phone camping in the grounds of a stately home in north Dorset. It was called the Realisation Festival and it was a kind of jamboree of progressive ideas, with 150 participants from around the world. There were eco toilets, hotwater showers, excellent food and wine and talks and workshops and yoga and theatre and music and botanical explorations.
The best thing really was chatting with the people you bumped into. A lot of them mentioned McGilchrist. A woman I spoke to yesterday morning was a neurologist from the States who said that US neurologists don’t rate McGilchrist very highly as a scientist. But she still thinks his cultural ideas are valuable and important.
I guess the essence of my argument is this:
There is more than one kind of truth. Reason, logic and facts are really important. You can use them with various kinds of utilitarian arguments to construct a morality.
But there is also a huge part played in our moral and other life choices by our feelings and instincts. The hypothesis of the justbeautyportal site is that our feelings about really good art are connected to our feelings about politics and our feelings about the planet. And all these things are linked to our ability to connect with our own feelings and to be honest with ourselves.
A lot of the talks and workshop at the festival were about the need for people to go beyond purely rational problem-solving to widen it through bodily awareness, empathy, deep listening. Perhaps being aware that there is often more than one single right answer, or contradictions that have to be held.
I have spent a fair amount of my life studying art, theatre, music, films, literature. The critics I have been impressed with have been able to take a difficult artist and open a door to make them comprehensible to someone who struggles to understand a new mode of expression.
The critics I am less impressed with are the ones who say “This book is not worth reading. This artist has just thrown a paint pot in the face of the public.” Most of the good artists in history have represented reality in a slightly different way and some critics have tried to shut them down.
Anyway – McGilchrist and his no doubt simplified brain theory is too useful an illustration for me to jettison from the website, which is centrally about how we can judge things from our feelings and instincts. It should be clear enough that the site is not there to argue against the scientific method – or to undermine science.
I have a particular interest in what we may be able to achieve in the field of psychic healing – especially in our own families, for example with me and my daughter M. In my exploration of my divorce and the impact on my daughter in the fictional form of my novel The Manual, I suggest that the male protagonist Henry has been trained to be super-rational and smart at numerical analysis, but it bypasses his feelings and empathy and sometimes his commonsense. There is more than one way of telling the truth about his family situation.
The task of loving or making peace with your enemies is a hard one. One of the Realisation female pundits said that in the face of the current global crises, we need to “build up our spiritual core strength.” Another one said we “have to be fierce mothers….we have to be able to hold people who are angry, difficult and suffering.”
So that’s it really. Can we learn from our feelings as well as our brains – and maybe become emotionally stronger and surer – and more capable of giving appropriate support and care to other people?
JULY 8 Final email from ARTIST with RATIONALIST’S comments in RED:
Today I want to explore why it could be important to try to convince religious people that they are “wrong.” Or that the God they believe in does not exist.
- Religious people may claim that science is invalid in its theories and findings. [A good reason to argue against them.] Agreed B.
- Religious people may claim unanswerable divine authority to tell other people what they can do. This is serious if the religious person is powerful and is coercing a weak person or child to do something that will be harmful to them. [A good reason to argue against them]. Agreed
- Historically religion has often been on the side of the status quo – so the Anglican Church has been described as “The Tory at Prayer.” That hymn – “The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate…” That is just how God meant it to be! Agreed [Trickier because churches like the Methodists and the Quakers and the low churches in Scotland have often been on the left wing, progressive side of the argument. The non-conformist tradition was always a challenge to the existing power and wealth structure. AgreedAt root, a body like the Christian Socialist Movement is saying that moral questions (like should I fight in this war? Should I pay my taxes? Should I cheat my customers a little?) are up to the conscience of the individual. The individual may think they are asking God for guidance, they may look at a passage in the Bible, or they may simply go with what feels right and sound to them. They may even do a utilitarian calculus. But it is up to the individual – not the King and the bishop’s representative.] Agreed [I don’t think it is valid to dismiss religion on political grounds, as maybe Karl Marx did. I would say that our human moral intuitions are a deeper guide to morality than any absolutist political theory. The end does not always justify the means.] Agreed[We feel a natural kinship with most other living things.] Mostly mankind has exploited the natural world, even if they tried to propitiate the spirits in case of retribution
- Religion has often been used to portray a rose-tinted, sentimental and nostalgic view of the world that encourages people to leave things as they are. This is connected to number 3 – don’t rock the boat, let’s continue with our King in his golden carriage driving to open Parliament, accompanied by cavalry with swords and absurd headgear – because it’s traditional. And naturally the King is head of our church, with all its glorious historic buildings. Let’s continue to worship God in our pews because it’s traditional – and it connects us to our ancestors and to the primitive and slightly superstitious part of our own selves. At the end of the day, the sunset is beautiful and all’s right with God’s world. And because we sit in a church and we say the same magical words as the rest of the congregation, we feel part of a community – a community of the heart. A bit like the adult audience at a Disney movie. Yes, one of the pillars of religion is community and a sense of belonging and place in a grand scheme. [ I think if religion makes people happier, that’s OK. We do have human needs to connect with our past and with other people in a non-rational, non-political way. So if it works for people, good luck to them.] As long as they leave the rest of us alone and don’t try to control us, personally, economically, socially, or politically, etc. [Very unlikely as long as organised religion exists!]
- Some of Iain McGilchrist’s friends are probably guilty on grounds 3 and 4. Are some of them upper class twerps who feel that a spiritual explanation of reality would allow them to feel more positive about living in a pretty little cottage in a historic village – and praying for the world to get better? Being kind and polite to everyone they meet, because they all have souls – but not trying to change anything in the social framework? [My answer to that is that upper class twerps are human beings too. They also have to cope with the almighty challenges of being human.] Probably, e.g. XXXX, the nuttiest, is an Anglican, but I don’t think it matters. Many are on the idealist track, leading them ultimately to religion of some reified type.
- Does human life have a purpose, a meaning? [ Yes it has the meanings we give it, and that we discover in it. I would argue that McGilchrist’s emphasis on thinking with the right brain as well as the left makes it easier for us to define some meanings for ourselves – and sometimes to agree about them with other people. Why? I think you personally need to answer this. Even though his analysis is simplistic and often dubious, and his theses are then applied well beyond their realm of applicability) I think he signifies something for you. I think it is the permission to reject careful and detailed analytical thought in favour of ill- defined intuitions and woolly ( if psychologically satisfyingly poetic) concepts. Harsh I know, but is there any truth in there? Once we begin to look at human wisdom, ( = real knowledge plus properly substantiated beliefs, plus fully informed choices?), we get into the areas of Acceptance of what we can’t change, (Acceptance is fine when the above definition of wisdom isused, but bear in mind George Bernard Shaw’ s quotation: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man) Thankfulness for the things which turn out right, and starting to unpack some of the emotional blockages and gloomy, destructive patterns in ourselves. [ which will require some detailed dispassionate self-analysis, either that, or someone else, to point out the truth. We can fool ourselves far better than we can fool others ] These are largely emotional and intuitive areas of our thinking and seeing. They are a job which is never finished. [ See above] We should be thankful to McGilchrist for pointing us in this direction [ which direction? Towards ill – defined unscientific religious concepts covered and rendered safe by the comforting blanket of educated speech and broad ranging erudition.] regardless of whether he has gone on to become a fellow traveller with some people who appear to deny reality. [ He has ] Reality will catch up with us all. [ Not if you cling to the cult and its dogmas]
THIS ROBUST DISCUSSION HAS BEEN INCLUDED ON OUR SITE – TO DEMONSTRATE THAT WE BELIEVE IN OPEN DEBATE. THE KIND OF HUMAN, SUBJECTIVE TRUTHS WE ARE HIGHLIGHTING WILL ALWAYS BE UP FOR ARGUMENT. THEY WILL NOT BE AS PRECISE AS SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS – AND THEY WILL CHANGE WITH TIME AND CONTEXT. THEY ARE IMPORTANT!