A Revolution in Thought Dr Iain McGilchrist

good evening my name is Ian mcgilchrist I write books about neuroscience and philosophy uh the best best known two are the master and his Emissary and the matd things today I'm going to be talking about the hemisphere Theory as a way of understanding what we call the metac crisis the various groups of problems of considerable severity that bevil us these days I believe that by understanding more about how the brain works we can see these disperate elements of the so-called metac crisis as coherent and in some sense as inevitable consequences of our espousal of a very strange way of thinking about and looking at ourselves and the world to which we belong good evening ladies and gentlemen welcome you join us of course for our fourth Darwin College lecture on the theme of Revolution over the last three weeks we've heard from a historian a geneticist and a political theorist each delivering a rich but varied perspective on the historical political and biological revolutions if you missed any of those they are of course on the Darwin College YouTube channel along with the lectures that have been delivered or many of them that have been delivered over the last 39 years this year we celebrate our 60th anniversary as the first postgraduate College here at the University of Cambridge and in the leadup to that our fellowship have recently adopted a 10-year strategic plan for the college which both recognizes that the world faces a broad spectrum of interrelated Global challenges we're familiar with many of them perhaps you might call them meta crisis as we will hear more about in due course and our strategic plan also includes a commitment to act on and promote solutions to such Global challenges and tonight's speaker May well help us on our way in that process so it's a great pleasure to welcome Dr Ian mcgilchrist to deliver his lecture I as a psychiatrist a writer a former Oxford literary scholar and after reading English at the University of Oxford uh he trained as a medic he's held numerous distinguished fellowships academic fellowships and written many scholarly papers and books which I'm sure you are familiar with at least some of you in his own words he came late to medicine but since then he served as a consultant psychiatrist a Clinical Director at senior registrant and consultant level in hospitals here in the UK and as a senior research fellow in in the United States so both he served on the front line and as a scholar in medical science and practice in an addition he has interests that span philosophy psychology literature neuroscience and indeed many other disciplines which together coales for him around a deep knowledge Fascination and understanding in the workings of the brain and I think he's therefore ideally placed to deliver this lecture on a revolution in thought how hemispheric Theory helps us to understand the meta crisis please join me in welcoming Ian to the stage Ian first of all I want to thank the master and fellows of Darwin college for the honor of asking me to give this lecture carved into the stone of the Ancient Temple of Apollo at Deli was the injunction to know thyself without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world I believe we've adopted a limited vision of a very particular type and precisely because it is limited we cannot see that it is limited we no longer seem to recognize what it is we do not know what our way of being in the world is pushing out of our lives and out of our world to understand what is going on we need a bread of view that is increasingly rare it is the possibility of this that I intend to explore here today let me ask you this do you think there is a connection between realism the appreciation of uniqueness a capacity for understanding melony Melody and Harmony an aptitude for appreciating time a sense of humor the ability to read body language to sustain attention and the flight or flight fight or flight mode or on the other hand between a talent for manipulation a giveness to literalism to Theory at the expense of experience unreasonable optimism and a preoccupation with detail as well as a loss of a sense of the living body with in its place a focus on body parts perhaps not yet I assure you there is such a connection in either case it is rooted deep in us and it is quite coherent once one comes to understand what underlies the pattern my reason for starting here is to introduce the body of work generated over three decades and published in two long books the master and his Emissary The Divided brain and the making of the Western World in 2009 and the matter with things our brains our delusions and the unmaking of the world in 2021 in these books I examine critically and in depth the matter of hemisphere difference and its important meaning for our lives as you can see from the deliberately random selection of respectively right and left hemisphere Tendencies above the distinction is not the simple one that many might have heard heard and which should be unceremoniously buried it's not at all the case that the left hemisphere is unemotional and dependable whereas the right hemisphere is flighty and fanciful if anything the contrary is the case but that the question has been wrongly answered doesn't invalidate the question but rather should in my opinion invite further exploration consider these facts the brain an organ the power of which consists solely in making connections is massively divided down the middle why moreover it is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured at many levels in both its structure and function why not only that but the band of fibers that connects the hemisphere at their base the Corpus kosin is getting proportionately smaller not larger over Evolution and is in any case to a large extent inhibitory in function again why could it be that two aspects of brain function are being kept apart unfortunately I cannot spend time on the evidence here for one thing there is a great deal of it and it requires to be examined at length it is laid out for that purpose in the two long books I've mentioned I'm going to go straight to a characterization of some of the core findings so please forgive me if these are lacking in finesse to some extent that is inevitable for present purposes as I'm sure you will understand in a nutshell each hemisphere has evolved for classical darwinian reasons to pay a different kind of attention to the world when I saw this I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me because I'd been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive function but the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance it creates and molds the only word we can world we can know indeed it is a matter of a disposing of our Consciousness towards the world in a particular way the left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow beam attention focus on the detail that we already know and desire and are intent on grabbing and getting whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way in a word the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation the right hemisphere meanwhile is on the lookout for everything else that's going on while we're manipulating for mates conp specifics Offspring and predators so as not to be eaten while eating its attention is Broad sustained coherent Vigilant and uncommitted as to what it may find the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere in brief the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole which is nothing less than the world and context changes everything the difference then is not as used to be supposed to do with what each hemisphere does as though it were some sort of a machine so much as the manner in which it does it as though it were part of a person the hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute indeed it is universally attested and since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention such a difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds hence my belief that attention is a moral act it helps form both us and the world we come to know so what are these two worlds like very briefly if crudely these worlds could be characterized like this in the case of the left hemisphere the world is simplified in the service of manipulation it is made of isolated static things things moreover that are already known familiar predetermined and fixed they're fragments that are importantly devoid of context disembodied and meaningless abstract generic quantifiable fungible mechanical ultimately bloodless and lifeless this is indeed not so much a world as a representation of a world which means a world that's actually no longer present but reconstructed after the fact and and it is literally two-dimensional schematic and theoretical not in fact a world at all more like a map nothing wrong with a map of course unless you mistake it for the world and here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control the left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom in the case of the right Hemisphere by contrast there is a world of flowing processes not isolated things one where nothing is simply fixed entirely certain exhaustively known or fully predictable but always changing and ultimately interconnected with everything else where context is everything where what exists are holes of which what we call the parts are an artifact of our way of attending where what really matters matters is implicit a world of uniqueness one where quality is more important than quantity a world that is essentially animate here the future is a product of realism not denial this is a world that is fully present rich and complex a world of experience which calls for understanding not the map at all but the world that is mapped the emotional tambra here is more cautious and in general more realistic we need both of these worlds to work together but also independently hence the need for connection and separation naturally we are not aware of this because these worlds are combined at a level below our awareness we become aware only after an accident of nature such as a stroke tumor or injury or after commissurotomy the so-called split brain operation or if one hemisphere at a time is experimentally suppressed then they may become suddenly vividly present to us yet because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties when we come to reflect self-consciously and to rationalize about what we find we're forced by the requirement for consistency to choose between the pictures of the world they offer this is why as aan Whitehead one of my intellectual Heroes observed a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse as in our postmodern world they are the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires yet almost everything that really matters to us the beauty of nature poetry music art narrative drama myth ritual sex love the sense of the Sacred must remain implicit if we're not to destroy their nature the attempt to make the implicit explicit radically Alters its nature we can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these all important but hidden sources from close to the long tradition of a society to Nature and to the sacred to sophisticate our understanding in fact we see these not as Irreplaceable guides to truths deeper than those that science can Encompass but as lies possibly entertaining lies but lies nonetheless we begin to see only the self-created self-referring world according to the left hemisphere we go for the machine model reductive materialism and the consequences are all around us unfortunately the two hemispheres are not equally veridical in terms of our ability to apprehend take hold of and use the world the left hemisphere is superior but in terms of the ability to comprehend the world the right hemisphere is Superior in each of what one might call the portals of understanding attention perception judgment emotional and social intelligence cognitive intelligence that is IQ and creativity the right hemisphere is so much super Superior that the left hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional this is not a rhetorical expression denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to the right Hemisphere and consequent dependence on the left hemisphere than the reverse on its own the left hemisphere confabulates makes up stor so to fit with its beliefs it will frankly insist that a paralyzed limb is unaffected or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the subject at all belongs to you Doctor unlike the right hemisphere which sees more than one angle and has for this reason been called by vs ramachandran the Devil's Advocate the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right it is never wrong and never at fault someone else is always to blame furthermore in what I take to be the four important onward paths to truth science reason intuition and Imagination though both hemispheres contribute The crucial part in each case including in science and reason is played by the right hemisphere not the left our predicament is that we now live in a world where the understand the understanding of which is largely limited to that of the inferior left hemisphere some signs of this include our inability to see the broader picture both in space and in time the way in which wisdom has been lost understanding reduced to Mere knowledge and knowledge replaced by information token representations the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment which are the products of experience the divorce of mind and matter resulting in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction and the debasement of matter to Mere lump and matter therefore our exploitation an exponential growth of bureaucracy and administration everywhere the proceduralization of Life the reduction of just Justice to Mere equality a loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things the supplanting of quality by quantity the abandonment of nuance in favor of simplistic either or positions the loss of reasonableness which is replaced by rationalization a complete disregard for common sense the design of systems not for humans but to maximize utility a growth of paranoia and evasive mistrust for if all is not under its control the left hemisphere becomes anxious and protects its anxiety outwards onto others nonetheless we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives in addition I might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere the destruction of social cohesion and its replacement by Angry Waring factions like almost everything that you used to be said about hemisphere differences the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong the most highly lateralized emotion is anger and guess what it lateralizes to the left hemisphere and there are more indications but for today's purposes I'll stop here in the second part of the master in his Emissary I Trac the main turning points in the history of ideas in the west and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern first there is a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two hemispheres in harmony that then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most and soon a decline after which the civilization eventually crumbles under its own weight I Trac this pattern beginning in the Greek world around the 6th Century BC in the Roman world around the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire EMP and in the modern world with the Renaissance in each case it's apparent that the vitality and Harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it overreaches itself becomes less creative more and more sclerotic unimaginative over administered over hierarchical and power hungry there is a cening of values where goodness Beauty and Truth had once been The Guiding value the need to control the value of power hold sway I'm sometimes asked why if the right hemisphere is more intelligent and by a long way more insightful than the left this progression is always leftwards it's a good question in brief there are a handful of reasons first and most obviously the left hemisphere is more is designed to Aid Us in grabbing stuff it controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing as such it is seductive not to say addictive second the left hemisphere view sees a very simplified schema of the world and offers simple answers to our questions its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all and offers the same mechanistic model to explain everything that exists when reductionist thinking encounters a problem in reconciling apparent irreconcilables for example matter and Consciousness it simply denies that one element or the other exists that's very convenient third the left hemisphere's worldview is easier to articulate though language is shared between hemispheres speech is almost always confined to the left the right hemisphere has literally no voice and the map isofacto vastly simpler than the complex terrain that is mapped almost everything that really matters cannot be found there or in the banality of discursive Pros fourth importantly there is or should be always an appeal from a theory back to the empirical evidence if you like the left hemisphere has a theoretical model the right hemisphere looks out of the window to see if the model corresponds with experience since the Industrial Revolution and particularly in the last 50 years we've created a world around us which in contrast to the Natural World reflects the left hemisphere's properties and its Vision what we see around us now looking out of the metaphorical window is rectilinear man-made utilitarian each thing ripped from the context in which it alone has meaning and for many the two-dimensional representations provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience of three-dimensional life in all its complexity fifth built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything including their own relationship essentially the right hemisphere tends to ground experience it knows that the left hemisphere has a valuable role though the left hemisphere then works on what it's offer to clarify unpack and generally render the implicit explicit and the right hemisphere finally re integrates what the left hemisphere's produce with its own understanding the explicit once more receding to produce a new now enriched home the left hemisphere's contribution then is valuable but must come at an intermediate stage problems arise when this is treated as it now often is as the end stage analysis is a valuable tool but breaking things down must be followed by an attempt to understand the whole once more unfortunately the left hemisphere is is unaware of what it is missing it doesn't know why the right hemisphere is important it cannot see the gestal the ultimately indivisible whole therefore it thinks it can go It Alone six a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere's World attracts to itself in positions of influence and Authority those whose natural Outlook is similar especially in the areas of science technology and administration which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary life they then make us more like themselves My worry is not that machines will become like people an impossibility but the people are already becoming more like machines finally I've already referred to the problem that a civilization that is increasingly cut off from its intuitive life relies more heavily on Exchange of explicit ideas in the public forum here though true truth is manifestly complicated and many an awareness of inherent ambiguities and a capacity for seeing both sides of a question what happened to that is no longer considered a strength the right hemisphere view is multifaceted and also already takes into account the left hemisphere's point of view this virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency and it is therefore liable to be dismissed I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world intellectually Dune and morally bankrupt as it is that has resulted in what has been called The Meta crisis not just the odd crisis here and there but the despoliation of the natural world the decline of species on a colossal scale the destabilization of the climate the destruction of the way of life of indigenous people the fragmentation and polarization of a once civil ized Society with escalating not diminishing resentments on all sides and escalating not diminishing gap between rich and poor a surge in mental illness not the promised increase in happiness a proliferation of laws but a rise in crime the abandonment of civil discourse a betrayal of standards in our major institutions government the BBC the police our hospitals schools and universities once rightly admired all over the world which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy inflexible and obsessed with enforcement of a world view that is in flat contradiction to reality and isn't their job to enforce and the looming manace of totalitarian control through AI these aspects of the so-called metac crisis have a multitude of proximal causes economic political social psychological technological and so on but beneath and beyond that each manifests within those Realms aspects of the left hemisphere's dysfunctional view of the world the very thing that originates the problem also militates against seeing the problem seeing the wider picture and necessarily Prelude to understanding is now increasingly disfavored and as a consequence the crises I've referred to are often seen as isolated pieces of bad luck but they're not they could have been and were by some predicted the metac crisis is the predictable outcome of a complete failure to understand what a human being is what the world is and what the one has to do with the other and all this is the sort of thing the right hemisphere is far better equipped to understand than the left the rightful Master the right hemisphere has been subjugated by his Emissary or servant the left in an entirely predictable parallel we have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant as so many have predicted since the time of Gerta we cannot say we were not warned even physics now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken but but because of our success in making machines we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we come across we ourselves our brains and Minds our society and the living world are now supposed to be explained by the metaphor of the machine yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire known universe are at all like a machine namely the machines we made in the last few hundred years machines unlike life and all complex systems whether animate or inanimate are linear and sequential are put together part by part from the ground up and can be switched on and off at will their default status is stasis not flow they are not resonantly embroiled with their environment they have precise boundaries their parts do not change structure and function as the whole changes and Evol Oles not least because in the machine the whole does not evolve and they are utilitarian constructs in service of the power of their maker none of this applies to life nor does it to anything else in the universe the brilliant mathematician and biophysicist Robert Rosen in his book life itself demonstrates just how unlike machines organisms are he further argues that the best way to understand all naturally occurring systems which are never merely complicated but complex and therefore never fully predictable is as organisms whether we choose to see them as alive or not and that's before one gets to consider the neglect of our emotional moral and spiritual nature which is at the core of Being Human we seem to have been seduced into thinking we understand everything and what's more can Master it and mold it like a machine so as to provide a future that will benefit mankind that this is a malign fantasy becomes pler with every passing day those with grand schemes to improve Humanity have caused misery on an almost unimaginable scale by their narcissism cruelty and willful blindness in Psychology there's something called the Dunning Krueger effect which tells us that the less people know the more they think they know it's hardly rocket science I admit but it is worth bearing in mind instead of seeing all things as processes running organically from the past to the Future across time and spreading out across the world through space like water finding its way across a landscape we see ourselves and the world as composed of static slices or points Here and Now compartmentalized in a way that conforms to the modus operandi of the left hemisphere a world of meaningless bits we owe nothing to and can learn nothing from history or so we believe we owe nothing to and Lead need leave nothing to posterity we turn a blind eye to the inevitable impact of our rapacity on more humble and more stable ways of life that have stood the test of time better than ours we neglect the importance of context we believe we are right right and that one size fits all justifying the imposition of vast Global bureaucratic structures not to say Wars so as to impose our thinking on cultures far different from our own equally we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic view of the world we've generated in the last 20 years and which we believe must now be forced on all whatever their reasonable misgivings and we treat people not as unique living beings but as exemplars of a category one aspect of this is the virtual machine known as bureaucracy famously how arand referred to the banality of evil one of the most disquieting aspects of the Nazi regime was its chilling bureaucracy mind-numbing evil was committed by people who were for the most part not conventional monsters but were simply following the ordained procedures real people and real life had been almost wholly obscured by pieces of paper and the recording of numbers after the war Theodor adoro saw developing around him what he called theal the administered World in which everything was controlled proceduralized and devitalized inevitably at that point in history this could not be separated from the evil that was narcism but adoro can see that it was much more than that narcism was at least as much a symptom of a new mentality as its cause a mentality of total control that had taken root in the form of a self- legitimizing bureaucracy the roots of which lay in the past he quoted the mid 19th century Austrian writer Ferdinand ker life no longer lives who does not recognize with a chill this diagnosis of the modern human predicament and adoro points out that it is not even the Triumph of The Logical since Administration serves to rationalize the irrational which explains why its workings and outcomes are often deeply unreasonable and deeply damaging the cancerous growth of more and more elaborate and more and more expensive bureaucracies in the world I particularly know hospitals and universities but the same could be said of government schools and the police is an inevitable and dangerous consequence of the world view we've adopted the other if possible still more dangerous expansion is that of AI bureaucracy and ai go hand in hand enlarging the Empire of the left hemisphere and making possible if not inevitable in the near future almost total control of the populace by any regime however malignant as we broaden our view it becomes apparent how much the metac crisis can best be seen as a war on nature and a war on life this my friends is the reality we face why on Earth should such a suicidal War come about there are three reasons that spring to mind one is that the left hemisphere which makes as what Benjamin Franklin called The Tool making animal thinks like a machine and has therefore exported machine likee thinking into our environment everywhere nature and life are therefore ultimately an impediment the second is that the left hemisphere really only understands its own representations what it itself has made and given to itself nature and life are therefore ultimately incomprehensible and the third and most important is the resentfulness of a mind that believes it understands and can and what's more should control all its surveys here nature and life are a rebuff to its power a rebuff which cannot be tolerated the German American Artist George gross produced a shockingly vivid expression of this mindset as he contemplated Europe before the second world war entitled I shall extinguish everything around me that restricts me from being the master the Contemporary fantasy that we can be whatever we want and do whatever we want is a cruel travesty of the truth this was never true and never could be it is the product of a culture of narcissistic fragmentation ironically we've invented new impediments to its fulfillment we now live in a world in which you cannot speak or act and until you've put each word before a humorous in a tribunal which is ready to say no to everything you want to say or do I'm of course a boring old stick but I feel so sorry for young people now whatever happened to the spontaneous act the sense of J to the movement of the spirit out of sheer exaltation even an Impulse to visit a gallery soon runs into the need to have booked weeks ahead ahead using an app and that's just getting into a gallery what about negotiating the numberless hazards of a date life no longer lives wisdom skill judgment intuition and even understanding all to be gained only from a life well- lived have been sidelined in favor of machine-like algorithms that stifle true thought the assault on life continues as far as a mechanic as far as a mechanical system is concerned human beings must be dispensable and wholly interchangeable in fact despite the rhetoric true diversity is not to be tolerated imaginative eccentrics lose their jobs humans must have no allegiances which might conflict with their duty to fit into their slot thus it is that we've seen concerted attacks on the idea that there are any differences between men and women attempts to brainwash children attacks on family and kill ship with their rightful claims on loyalty on the professions with their expertise which must be replaced by blind rule following and their codes of Ethics which a machine cannot understand and which is therefore replaced by the pretense that teachers doctors and Priests are just providing a service to Consumers rather than embodying what are ultimately sacred duties indeed that anything should be sacred it isn't the front to the power hungry left hemisphere a dominated mind belief in a Divine Cosmos is seen as standing in the way of whatever Society the machine hurtles us towards Milton saw it all Lucifer the bright cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he and the Very word Society reminds us that no properly functioning Society is mechanistic so we see social cohesion dissipate and Living Traditions erased in their place fragmentation the stoking of resentment and a rise of aggression this in turn is deemed to require what the toille pressingly described as a network of small complicated rules that he fora would come to strangle life itself once the Integrity founded in an intuitive moral sense is lost a society becomes like a building that has lost its integrity and needs to be shored up with ever more scaffolding now there has to be a law for everything yet crime escalates why when we see how devastating this process can be do we carry on promoting it the physicist David B reflected on a phenomenon he called sustained incoherence characteristic of what he called thought the thought process we now know to be typical of the left hemisphere what he meant was that on seeing incoherence it would be intelligent to stop look for the cause and change Tac but he noticed there was a reflex defensiveness in thought that leads instead to obstinate continuation in other words the left hemisphere above all else does not want to hear why it might have got things wrong I see widespread evidence of this sustained incoherence in corporations governments Health Systems and education everywhere that management culture hold sway that when things go wrong it's never that we've been traveling in the wrong direction or have gone too far in what may once have been the right direction it's always that we've not gone far enough this links to the Dunning Krueger effect the less you know the smarter you think you are but a further finding by Dunning and colleagues reinforces the relationship with the left hemisphere mindset because of its preference of simple linear algorithms and procedures that it believes logically must lead to a certain outcome those who've bought into such procedures think they must be in the right even when the outcome ought to compel them to the opposite conclusion psychological experiments show that once they're committed to their theory of how things work drawing attention to its obvious failure in the real world leads not to a flicker of Doubt but to arise in confidence and redoubled efforts along the same line I'm sure we can all think of many such dead ends in the world around us but I want to refer to just one in the time available to me the squandering of trust this has the distinction of being at the same time supremely important and almost completely ignored truth and Trust Words which come from the same root naturally go together one cannot have trust in a society where no one is speaking the truth and one cannot be true to a society where there is no trust as confucious told his disciple Su Kong for a stable Society a ruler needs three things weapons food and Trust if he cannot hold all three he should forgo weapons first and food next for quote without trust we cannot stand trust costs nothing but the time to build it once built it is a fantastically efficient way for any any human Enterprise a particularly a society to operate but it's easy to lose there's a Dutch proverb trust arrives on foot but departs on Horseback the massive complex of administration and AI do nothing to promote a society of trust but actively undermine whatever is left of it at every turn being trustworthy is no small thing and its importance needs to be inculcated at an early age and then nourished by both individual and Society no one will believe in us if we cannot believe in ourselves we need to start believing in ourselves again and deserving to be believed in once people lose pride in being as good as their word doing the best job they can and expecting much of themselves rules have to be enforced from without and a penal code substitutes for the moral code it helped to destroy mediocrity quickly displaces Excellence boredom replaces Vitality this is not not only vastly less effective but hugely costly in terms of administration and litigation not to mention time and morale and leads to a wicked problem once trust has been lost it's not easy to remove the scaffolding of rules and procedures which have come to take its place in the world of capital older Europe European business practices based on honor have been grossly undermined by a smarter Paradigm imported from America in the pursuit of short-term gain by defectors this was very shortsighted trust has also been lost in the world of schools and universities hospitals the police and the Army all of which now have massive recruitment problems because the perception is that lives of service are no longer respected or properly rewarded that the necess necessary creativity Independence self-reliance and initiative required by a skillful professional will be stifled and that the best candidates will not be supported and promoted because of a patronizing agenda based on the ticking of boxes and militating against Excellence like civilizations before us which drifted further and further to the Outlook of the left hemisphere would appear to be engaged in committing suicide intellectual and moral if not indeed literal for I fear that the Western world may longer have the will or the skill to defend itself against authoritarian enemies that we cannot just wish away because in our Theory they don't figure we seem sometimes beused at how so often a path that looks promising leads us somewhere almost opposite to where we intended but seeing thect picture in the round we start to see why the outcome we wish for deluded eluded us we feel we are beset by paradoxes in the M matter with things I devote a chapter to logical Paradox and explore around 30 of the best known paradoxes that have intrigued and largely baffled Phil philosophers historically in every case I explain why the apparent Paradox can be seen as stemming from the different dispositions towards the world offered by the right and left hemispheres this doesn't mean however that each take is equally valid in Zeno's well-known Paradox of achiles and the Tortoise although he purports to prove that Achilles can never catch up with never mind overtake the tortoise we know perfectly well that in real life he can overtake the tortoise in a couple of strides as a society we pursue happiness and we become measurably less happy over time studies of rates of psychopath pathology in adolescence relying on serial contemporaneous assessments using the same objective instrument and meeting stringent standards over the period from 1938 to 2007 showed that there were between five and eight times not five or 8% more but five between five and eight times as many students that met a common cut off for Psychopathology in the lat cohort compared with the earliest and this may be an underestimate because many recent subjects were already stabilized on an anti-depressant a possibility that didn't exist for the earliest cohorts rates of suicide which have always been about three times higher in men are rising most steeply in young women we privilege autonomy and end up Bound by rules to which we never ascented and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time we pursue leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever and that we have less time than we had before we also find that the technology places an enormous burden on our time alienates us from Human intercourse and exposes us to risk from organized criminals and mind control by disorganized criminals such as governments the means to our ends are ever more available while we have less sense of what our end should be or whether this purpose to anything at all economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash they promptly crash we're so eager that all scientific research results in positive findings that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable and therefore discovers less and less um that is truly significant Advan in scientific thinking we grossly misconceive the nature of studying the humanities as utilitarian in some way in order to get value for money and thus render it pointless and in this form certainly a waste of resource we improve education by dictating curricular and focusing on exam results to the point where free thinking arguably an overarching goal of true education is discouraged in our universities many students are in any case so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from disc Russians that threaten to examine the model critically and their teachers who should know better in a serious dereliction of Duty collude we over sanitize and cause vulnerability to infection we overuse antibiotics leading to Super bacteria that no antibiotic can kill we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with let alone relish uncertainty or risk and are rendered vulnerable the left hemisphere's motivation is control and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear as though it could only see one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions at any one time which is all that it can if these paradoxes surprise us it's because we've not thought far enough ahead in time or broadly enough in space we take a small part of the complex for the whole the awareness coming from the right hemisphere can Embrace that of the left but not the other way around when the hemispheres are working together under the unifying influence of the right hemisphere the effect is not purely additive but transformative however since the left hemisphere not only takes in less but understands what it does take in that well our almost exclusive Reliance on it the servant in contemporary Western culture is a problem of some considerable proportions the three things on which human flourishes and well-being most depend are these belonging to a cohesive social group which one can trust and with which one can share one's life closeness to the natural world and communion with a Divine realm however conceived this is not just my opinion but borne out by a vast and ever increasing body of research but none of this Accords with our current value power it's hardly a surprise then when we see that material affluence does not make us happy if accompanied by spiritual poverty let me finally consider the influence of left hemisphere capture on the realm of value for over 2,000 years in the platonic and later the Christian tradition of West and thought human life was seen as orientated towards three great values goodness Beauty and Truth each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the Sacred during my my lifetime I've seen each of these important values along with the sacred repudiated and reviled a model that favors the machine over the human being the inanimate over the living is one that is corrosive of all that is beautiful good and true and has no place in it for the sacred the early 20th century philosopher Max sha was much concerned with questions of value when he died in 1928 haiger who gave his funeral oration described him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time Shayla thought there was a hierarchy of values which um with with those of pleasure and utility the values of utilitarianism in the left hemisphere at the lowest level and Rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred which he considered the highest a value which I suggest is incomprehensive anible to the left hemisphere in between were first the lebens Vera or values of life such as courage magnanimity nobility loyalty and humility and then the gist the values of mind or Spirit such as Beauty goodness and Truth which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere the left hemisphere's resal being power and control it naturally puts values of utility and heathenism those of the lowest rank in shaya's pyramid first I may be wrong but it's my distinct impression that there has been a decline in Courage magnanimity nobility loyalty and humility in our society indeed in all behavior that carried its costs up front rather than concealing its sting in the tail speaking the truth takes courage and it would seem that those in our public institutions would rather conform than conf front untruth and along with the loss of courage to speak the truth there's been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred all of this combines to reinforce a loss of sense of purpose and Direction hence the crisis of meaning that is by now a common place that we Face Shayla calls the human being ends amand the being that is capable of love in its place we have homoeconomicus in the world we live in reductionist materialism inverts shaya's perception and in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human we have exalted the individual ego over all else and it has rendered many virtues including but not confined to Beauty goodness and Truth obsolete these values I believe far from being human inventions are ontological Primitives for they are aspects of the ground of being our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege and indeed I argue our purpose that is why there is life at all we can of course also ignore them devalue them and cause them to wither away at what cost to us personally and to the whole of the Living World we can only surmise the world we are creating is one that computes as far as the left hemisphere is concerned but is grossly impoverished demoralized and lacking in meaning one that is in some more fit for a computer than for a human being I'm often asked what we need to do about this predicament this is understandable of course but I think that any list of bullet points so no doubt needed at one level risks missing the point almost entirely at another for it's not that we took the wrong decision here or there but that we've completely lost Direction because of the the value we've come to espouse as I get nearer to the end of life I'm more and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a fulfilling life the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing Natural World At Large but every bit is important as survival itself what I mean is this even if we were by a massive effort and a massive stroke of Fortune enabled to prevent any further loss of the world's for fors reverse the pollution of the oceans reverse the decline of species and similarly tackle the other aspects of the metac crisis I have mentioned this would be in vain if it simply meant that we did not change our hearts and Minds for we would still be the same hubristic entitled resentful power hungry animals that we have become and this like the rest has everything to do with the dominance of the left hemisphere's mode of being we can be far better than that so what are we to do I could list the bullet points the left hemisphere would like me to which along the way would inevitably refer to reforming the educational system to a Revival of the humanities a serious reduction in bureaucracy to the cultivation of meditative or spiritual practices to the abstinence from social media keeping machines in the background where they can be helpful but away from intercourse with humans and much more that we all know might help and of course it goes without saying that we must tirelessly seek to stop and where possible reverse damage to Nature I will not say the environment since the term expresses the separation from nature that is part of the problem but these will not themselves heal a matter of psyche or Soul there is no quick fix for such problems alas as a psychiatrist I would often know after listening to a patient for an hour or more on their first visit what it was they needed to do and when I was inexperienced I used to tell them that was a mistake until a person truly sees for him or herself from the inside what it is they need to do they will not do it and once they do see it they will not need to be told the work is to get them to that place the good news is that we can begin healing the work each one of us today people say what can I do the world is so huge and I'm so small and sometimes they add and our planet is so small in an incomprehensibly vast Universe there's a lot I could say about that but this is to think in the left hemisphere terms measuring and quantifying when the lover says my love is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the skies how large or small is that all the important changes happen from in here not out there it's been said that if we could change radically the hearts and minds of only 3% of people we will be able to change and bring about the changes we need to see in the world around us so my recommendations might be quite simple Begin by cultivating a sense of awe and wonder rather than clever clever knowingness about the extraordinary complex and beautiful Cosmos which it a pure gift that we have been given a life in think about what we're to do with it and in order to do that well to to have compassion to others and to all the living world not a sense of aggressive embattlement against forces that we quite probably misunderstand and to begin to adopt a sense of the little that we can know in other words a kind of not willing ignorance but the beginnings of true knowing which is when we recognize ize how little that we know that is the first step towards true knowledge for this to happen we need to understand ourselves and new G sayon know thyself we need every Insight we can get into what we're doing to ourselves to life itself and to our in expressively beautiful and complex world I hope I may have here offered one such Insight however small the work is great but we are capable of greater things than we know thank you thank you very much thank you very much thank you thank you so much Ian for what for me at least was an extraordinar thoughtful philosophical analytical insightful and and knowledge and practice-based uh lecture uh simp simply wonderful clearly um drawing without doubt on what must be an enormous brain uh and I suspect a very large right hemisphere but thank you really that was magnificent um I have learned a great deal I hope uh about how we might really address the metac crisis that you have so clearly articulated um uh I've also so rather nervous about carrying the title master I have to say so we might do something about that but no thank you that was wonderful please do come back next week um uh we have Sor I can't yes well I hope the audience can uh because we move from what goes on inside our head to what goes on out there in space our next lecture is the Swiss astronomer a Nobel Prize winner DDA quellos uh who is going to be talking about the EXO Planet Revolution but please once again join me with an enormous thank you to I

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

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Length: 64min 11sec (3851 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024