Meet Iain McGilchrist
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see a list of other entries that might be of interest, 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
The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend, see it all for what it is. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021), p. 3
The left hemisphere has dismantled the universe and is unable to put it back together again. Without a radically different understanding we just can’t carry on. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021), p.1328
Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. Iain McGilchrist, from Home Page on Channel McGilchrist, retrieved 12/8/23
[I]f I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles toward the abyss. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009), p. 237
The Cold War Mentality has persisted beyond the end of the Cold War. I have taken that as an invitation to propose that we consider this Mentality not as a reflection of something “real” in the world but a phenomenon that derives from one of the ways our brains present reality to us. Viewed in this way, it is more fundamental than any presumably “objective” state of affairs.
I will be asking, then, whether we should be seeing The Mentality as something more like a “mode of thinking” of the kind Einstein may have been referring to in the epigraph for this entry—an epigraph that regular readers of You Might Want to Know will know I’ve often used.
In this exploration I will be leaning heavily on the recent research and writing of Iain McGilchrist. Readers of earlier entries will have already seen a number of epigraphs taken from his writings. This particular entry is intended to introduce him and his work more fully to the readers of You Might Want to Know.
Iain McGilchrist was born in 1953 and is a graduate of Oxford University. He has had several careers, first as an Oxford don and scholar of literature, then, after getting a medical degree, as a practicing psychiatrist and neurological researcher, and then (or, better, all along the way) as a philosopher.
For decades of this career he was selected as a Fellow at All Souls at Oxford. The fellowships awarded by All Souls are as prestigious as they get. Nothing is expected of All Souls Fellows except that they continue with their own research and, possibly, writing.
In Iain McGilchrist’s case, a result was powerful proposals about the structure and function of our brains and the very different ways they make reality available to our awareness.
His proposals and the massive scientific and scholarly research that support them can be found in two big books, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, published in 2009, and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2 vols.), published in 2021.
Before and since the publication of The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist has given and continues to give interviews and lectures, many of which are available for free on YouTube. His Channel McGilchrist requires a subscription but offers as well things like transcripts of Q&A sessions and him reading a collection of poems he curated.
In the videos, we see a person who is, I would say, beautifully spoken and generous and responsive in his interactions with others. I strongly recommend reading his books but these videos can get one started well enough.
McGilchrist is a lucid and engaging writer whose intended audience is not first of all specialists or experts in the many fields with which he is deeply conversant. The documentation he provides in footnotes will be enough, I should think, to mollify specialists and experts. He is happy, also, to acknowledge differences of opinion and to defend himself against some criticisms he has received. He does this in the body of his texts in a generally accessible way and in a more straight-up academic way in appendices.
In his writing, he is scrupulous about defining terms that have specialized meanings and about translating passages and terminology from the other languages he knows. He doesn’t, as some do, drop exotic terms in the text and leave them sitting there, perhaps as a way of showing off.
He has written his books, he tells us, to be the kind of thing that can be experienced in separate and not necessarily consecutively ordered visits. Readers will not have to walk a line. Reading his work is not a walk in the park, however, or not just a little walk in a little park. More like a good hike. His work does ask something of us. It asks us, or I would rather say invites us, to see how we might want to change our mode of thinking.
I don’t think anyone who reads much of Iain McGilchrist’s work will regret it, quite the opposite. By far the predominant response in readers of his work, I’ve observed, is profound gratitude—for making available to us something that helps us make sense of much that is troubling today. This is the response even from writers who have been traveling in similar terrain and are themselves experts.
Iain McGilchrist does not often apply the hemisphere hypothesis to current affairs, except at a very high level of generality. There he is very clear that he believes, as many of us do, that we are, at present, ambling “toward the abyss.” When he is asked, as he often is, to offer up recipes, plans, methods for addressing our perilous moment, he is reticent. I understand this reticence as stemming from the fact that whatever he might offer along these lines would privilege the LH, the hemisphere that seeks power and control. Given his argument that “capture” by the LH is what has set us on the path to disaster, and his wish to convey the critical importance of the affordances of the RH to our understanding and our way of “being in the world,” this reticence is understandable.
I wrote most of the entries in You Might Want to Know before I came upon Iain McGilchrist’s work. My response to my encounter with his work has also been profound gratitude.
Now, perhaps rashly, I will be bringing his ideas to bear to shine a light on a matter of “current affairs,” our subject in You Might Want to Know, nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. I believe his ideas will help me, and us, greatly in the effort I am about to make to wrap up You Might Want to Know with an exploration of how we might sensibly hope to eliminate nuclear weapons.
In “A Note to the Reader” in The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist has written:
If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves. Such, at any rate, is my intention in this book. The journey matters — because it is the arrival. This means that for some, every succeeding view will disclose some new aspect of an always changing landscape with which at every turn they become better acquainted, for others the landscape will appear to be, unrewardingly, always the same landscape. xvii
I find this a nice statement of the spirit in which I have been writing the weekly entries in You Might Want to Know, beginning in February 2021. Not as argument, more as a kind of travel and invitation to “wild surmise.”
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 that might be of interest, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
Next: The Mentality at Home