The Modes of the Hemispheres II
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
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 the previous entry, we set out some of the findings regarding the modes of thinking—the worlds afforded by—the left (LH) and right (RH) hemispheres of our brains. To review and extend the account:
To perform its function of rendering what it perceives outside itself as things that may be manipulated and used, the LH has to strip from reality context and nuance. The RH is the hemisphere that is able to restore context and nuance. Only to some extent, of course. Not all of reality. But the RH makes available to our awareness not things in parts or abstracted into categories, but entities that are themselves both unique wholes and parts of larger wholes—not, that is, entirely stripped of context and nuance.
Our LH also sees these things as out of time. In the world the LH gives us, we do not appreciate that every thing we see, even the most permanent-seeming, is changing. Every thing, even a mountain and the boulders at its foot, let alone the tools and machines and “products” we have made, is changing in the way a stream of water in a river changes. It may not be changing at a rate that allows us to recognize this at the time, certainly not if we are seeing the world according to the left hemisphere. But what exists is, nevertheless, flow.
One of the values of the LH, McGilchrist shows, is “precision,” a word that derives from the Latin for “cutting off.” Precision, which can be highly useful to us in manipulating things—in designing our machines or the guidance systems for our ICBMs, for example—can be attained only by cutting away much of reality. A perhaps surprising implication of this proposition is that it is a mistake to think of precision as bringing us closer to reality. It can add to usability or power. It does not add to understanding.
Other inferences can be made from what we’ve set out so far about the world according to the two hemispheres.
The LH is able to represent only what is in some way already known to it, what is familiar, what it expects to see. What is not familiar, what it doesn’t expect to see, it is altogether likely to miss. The RH is open to more than the already known.
The LH knows. The RH is open to experience.
The LH, rather than opening up to possibility, closes down to what it takes as certainties. To preserve these “certainties,” it is altogether likely to confabulate, to construct fictions that justify the certainties. The fictions may well take the form of conspiracy theories. In any case, the LH is unlikely to doubt or revise itself, even in the face of “facts” and “good arguments.”
The LH jumps to conclusions and after doing so tends to be incorrigible. This may appear as decisiveness and firmness. Or, to one who can see what is being missed, as stubbornness, obtuseness, and delusion.
The LH creates worlds in which something is or isn’t what the LH takes it to be, a world of either/or, not of both/and—let alone a world of both either/or and both/and. More on this to come.
The LH is unaware of its limitations. Knowing less, it thinks it knows more. Those in the grip of the LH’s way of seeing the world can be lulled into a false sense of security.
When the world that the LH apprehends is made available to the RH, the RH may be able to restore to awareness reality as a changing, contextualized, unique entity, something that is finally, like experience, not graspable. The uniqueness and transitoriness of all things that inevitably escape the LH’s apprehension may be restored, or better, transcended.
The actions that follow upon the apprehensions of the LH can result in “overreaching,” going too far. Taking the wider, deeper, longer view of the RH, we may realize that the LH, while it seems to and does offer the happy prospect of immediate utility and control, is leading us, unaware, to unexpected, unfortunate, even disastrous outcomes, as it seems to be doing now. Without our ever coming to realize that’s what is happening.
Is this a paradox—something that seems both true AND incredible? And what if it is?
“There is a paradox entailed in paradox,” writes Iain McGilchrist.
What we call paradox is seen by the purely analytic mind [LH] as a sign of error somewhere—an error which it may be hard to identify, but which nonetheless exists, and must be flushed out and exposed, no doubt by further analysis. Meanwhile, to the imaginative mind, it may be a sign of quite the opposite: that we are at last approaching, in one of two possible senses, a deeper level, not of error, but of truth.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, 641
Next: On the Modes of the Hemispheres IIIA
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.