The Modes of the Hemispheres I
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021)
In two recent books that it is easy to call “monumental,” Iain McGilchrist sets out the hypothesis—massively supported by scholarship and recent scientific research, not to mention clinical experience—that though we are not ordinarily conscious of it, the hemispheres of our brains deliver to us two very different versions of the world.
What follows in the next few entries will be a summary of McGilchrist’s findings in support of what he calls “the hemisphere hypothesis.” The account offered here will be far less nuanced and well documented than the one offered in McGilchrist’s books, but, I hope, in no way misleading. It will also be shaped to some extent in accordance with the primary focus of You Might Want to Know: our life with nuclear weapons and the history of the nuclear arms race.
The place to begin, I think, is with McGilchrist’s proposition that the left hemisphere of our brain offers to our awareness a world that is divided into parts, into things that are not the “real” things themselves, in spite of what we might assume, but into abstract representations in the form of categories.
Here’s an example. If we are seeking food, the LH enables us to see something as “apple” or “rabbit,” both of which we may perceive as in the larger category of “things good to eat.” The context in which these things appear, the whole of which they are a part, is not made available to us by the LH. Nor are the unique qualities of the particular apple or rabbit. We do not see the larger living world of the apple or the rabbit, nor do we see that apple or that rabbit, the only one exactly like it that has ever existed or ever will, a—constantly changing—wonder of the world. We see only “an apple” or “a rabbit”—a “thing” that if we are hungry we may wish to grasp and use for our particular purposes.
Where can we see this kind of world being presented in, say, the Cold War?
In any war, real people struggle with each other in ways that have real effects on them. But the antagonists present to each other as abstract categories. In the Cold War, the salient categories were “Communists” and “capitalists,” or even more abstractly, “Communism” and “capitalism.” These abstractions might be made somewhat more concrete in the categories of “the Soviet Union” (and after 1950, China) versus “the Western countries.” All still, of course, abstractions from the really real.
Context and nuance are lost.
Soldiers wear uniforms as a way of confirming their categorization, a way that distances them from the complexity and uniqueness of the wearer of the uniform. This also can render them, to themselves, as part of a team, an entity taken to be of greater significance than the individual soldier (though also an abstraction). Being part of a team (or to put another light on the matter, a member of a mob) can become a matter of greater significance than the individual self, even to the individual self.
Being offered the world in the way the LH does afford us a kind of power, the power to use and control and manipulate the things the LH has made available to our awareness. It does not give understanding of the world the LH is making available.
The LH has serious limitations when it comes to understanding, McGilchrist shows. It is, furthermore, unaware of these limitations which it sees as irrelevant to its immediate project of grasping and using, of exercising power. As McGilchrist puts it, the LH, knowing less, thinks it knows more.
The right hemisphere is the one that can bring us, or bring back to us, context, wholeness, uniqueness—again not things themselves, and not what we may grasp and control. It does not offer reality pure and simple, but something closer to reality than what the LH is able to offer.
Consider: In reality—though not in the world made available by the LH—every thing is always changing, whether or not our poor powers of perception allow us to perceive this or to see how it is changing. McGilchrist quotes more than once the dictum of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, whose philosophy he greatly admires: “Everything flows.” This is not how it is in the world of the LH.
Without the contributions of the RH, we are all too likely to fail to appreciate that, in reality, every thing changes and is always changing. The LH may well take the abstracted and categorized and taken-out-of-time world it makes available to us as what’s really real, when that world offers only representations of what’s real that are missing, as all representations do, much of what might be offered to our awareness and understanding. “The map is not the territory,” in a phrase coined by the early-20th century Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski. To the LH alone, even “the territory” is not the territory, though it may confidently think so.
What the RH restores is not balance. The worlds afforded by the two hemispheres are not entirely incompatible but neither are they commensurate. What is needed is not a “negotiation” in which “positions” are “staked out,” “common interests” and “agreed differences” identified. What is being invited, listened, looked for is more like a new harmony, a new relation of parts that themselves offer nothing of what is needed but in the new relation realize a good and beautiful—it may be—reality.
Here’s a poem by the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) that offers an inkling of some of what we are trying to get at here:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (1818)
A poem, when it is a poem, exceeds the grasp of the LH. What may be taken to be a poem’s message isn’t the poem. Poems afford experiences. For messages, the LH will do. For experiences, the RH must be recruited.
In 1957, the year the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik and announced it had the world’s first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, Helen Keller published a book called The Open Door. It would be her last book and was clearly intended to deliver a message, though what it can do for us is more than that.
“Security is mostly a superstition,” she wrote.
It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Serious harm, I am afraid, has been wrought to our generation by fostering the idea that they would live secure in a permanent order of things. It has tended to weaken imagination and self-equipment and unfit them for independent steering of their destinies. Now they are staggered by apocalyptic events and wrecked illusions. They have expected stability and find none within themselves or in their universe. Before it is too late they must learn and teach others that only by brave acceptance of change and all-time crisis-ethics can they rise to the height of superlative responsibility.
What does any of this have to do with eliminating nuclear weapons?
Next: More on The Modes of the Hemispheres II