The Mentality at Home
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.
Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. Ian McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021)
In our daily lives, we are likely to think that what we know of the world is a simple function of what the world is. We see what we see because it is, simply, there.
Ian McGilchrist reminds us that the worlds we may take as simply there are necessarily made available to us by (or as brain researchers may say, “mediated by”) our brains. It should take only a moment’s thought to realize that we would know nothing of the world if our brains didn’t somehow make it available to us, and that what is in our brains through our senses is nothing like what may and may not be “there” outside us. Our brains are not containers for “things.” They are a bunch—a very big bunch—of cells called neurons that can connect, or refrain from connecting, with each other. From this it follows that what we “know” or “perceive” of the world is only that which our brains make available to us and that we will “know” it only in the way our brains make it available to us.
McGilchrist strongly disagrees with the view that the world is nothing but the creation of our brains, that what’s there is only what’s in our brains. He would consider that another product of what he calls the school of “nothing buttery.” (Another member of this school is the proposition that our brains are “nothing but” computers, our bodies “nothing but” machines.)
There exists something beyond and outside of us, McGilchrist maintains, to which, when we give our attention to it, our brains relate. Whatever is outside of us is afforded to our awareness, however, only by and in accordance with what our brains are able to do.
It is also the case, McGilchrist argues, that whatever exists outside of us is finally beyond our powers of specification, beyond our grasp, no matter how much we sometimes think that we have it “figured out” and under control.
In his books, McGilchrist sets forth the neurological research (some of which is his own) that has shown that our brains (and the brains of all animals, it seems) are divided. They are divided in physical structure and also, the research has shown, not surprisingly, in function. As a result, our world is made available to us in two strikingly different ways—the way of the left hemisphere (LH) and the way of the physiologically different right hemisphere (RH).
When all is well, or at least okay, the two hemispheres complement each other in giving us the world we experience as the world.
What I’m calling The (Cold War) Mentality is, I believe, following McGilchrist, an unhappy result of the left hemisphere having captured our perception and understanding of the world and usurping what the right hemisphere offers.
It is important to realize going in that we do not have here a question of whether to choose one hemisphere’s world rather than the other’s. Human brains (and, it seems, all animal brains) have evolved to have these two very different ways of giving us the world.
The affordances of both hemispheres are necessary to human flourishing.
In a search for human flourishing, we should not either think that we are looking for some brand new scheme or mode of thinking, some new invention. We should think instead that we are looking for a restoration of something like harmony between the modes we already have.
The modes of thinking of the two hemispheres are, however, as we said above, strikingly different from each other. (Vastly different also, McGilchrist is at pains to show, from early popularized accounts of hemisphere differences, particularly in the case of the right hemisphere. For the argument here, see, for example, pages xii-xiii of the Preface to the New Expanded Edition (2018) of The Master and his Emissary.)
So what are the characteristics of the worlds the two hemispheres give us? How is it that the LH might “usurp” the affordances of the RH? And how is it that a usurpation by the LH is something that might bring us to “unparalleled catastrophe”?
The accounts I will give here of the differences in what the hemispheres make available to us will offer only some of the conclusions that emerge from the vast research and scholarship that McGilchrist details in his books. Readers will have to go to the books for the vast research and scholarship.
I will be exploring and extending the implications of the findings primarily to shine a light on some of the issues we have been exploring in You Might Want to Know. But the implications extend far beyond these issues. Readers are invited to extend the findings to issues in their own lives. If what McGilchrist says is on the right track, and I obviously believe it is, doing so should prove fruitful.
Here goes.
Next: The Modes of the Hemispheres I