The Modes of the Hemispheres IV
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.
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. The Matter with Things (2021), 3
In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale UP, 2009), Iain McGilchrist surveys—with wonderful scope—the history of the Western world, to identify eras when a usurpation by the LH is manifest.
Our modern world has been usurped by the LH, he believes, and, given our current technological capabilities, which include the capacity to destroy life on the planet with nuclear weapons and likely also the capacity to destroy it through human-caused pollution and climate change, this usurpation is leading us, as the operations of the left hemisphere left to themselves will inexorably do, to the “unparalleled catastrophe” Einstein saw us drifting toward if we did not change our “mode of thinking.”
Without the useful contributions of the LH, though, might we starve?
If Nuclear Winter were to result by virtue of an exchange of only a hundred or so nuclear weapons, which are achievements of the left hemisphere, we will indeed, we are told, starve. Or if, also because of other achievements of the left hemisphere—in this case de-forestation and technologies that use fossil fuels—the temperature of our taken-for-granted Earth’s atmosphere were to tip into a state of irreversible increase, we also would starve. If, in the heat, we lived long enough to.
But what about short of that? What about in “ordinary life”? Don’t we have to, in the words of the poem by Robert Frost, “provide, provide”?
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.
Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.
Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.
Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
The Christian Bible begs to differ with the message of this poem, if we think “Provide, provide!” is the message of this poem. I don’t: it’s more interesting than that and, as with most good poems, the “message” isn’t really the point. The experience is.
In any case, in Matthew 6:28-33 (King James version), we read,
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
I would guess that most of us alive in the world today qualify as “ye of little faith.” Most, perhaps not all. The words of the Beatles’ John Lennon may apply. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
In any case, in the frame offered by the work of Iain McGilchrist, the words in Matthew clearly invite us to acknowledge and welcome the world of the RH. Many wisdom traditions hold up the ideal of “faith,” or “awakening” or “enlightenment” as a condition devoutly to be wished, though not to be achieved through an effort of will.
We come to such a condition, the work of Iain McGilchrist suggests, only through affordances of the right hemisphere. We all have right hemispheres, unless through the most terrible misfortune.
It is important to note that neither “Matthew” nor these wisdom traditions ask us to imagine that even in an “enlightened” or “saved” state we could do without what Matthew calls “all these things.” Instead, we are asked to have faith that if we seek first “the kingdom of God…all these things will be added” unto us.
And what if we happen to have “all these things”—raiment, and food and drink? And shelter? There is ample evidence, isn’t there?, that if we are in the grip of the left hemisphere, the “grasping” may not cease, even when we have a sufficiency of these things.
Iain McGilchrist doesn’t ask or suggest that we should ask, for an exclusive faith, if by that we mean discarding the world of the LH. Instead he asks for and holds up for our consideration as desperately needed today greater “harmony” between the different kinds of worlds offered by the two hemispheres of our brains.
For most of us, I suspect this kind of harmony seems more attainable than an exclusive faith. Especially when we are told by those who seem to have achieved this harmony that it is made attainable, not by new-fangled technologies, or will-power, but by such measures as being more still, by listening and looking more deeply, and freely giving all we can of our precious attention to our experience of each other and the world.
Next: The Modes of the Hemispheres: V. Either/Or, Both/And, and Both Either/Or and Both/And