Pursuit of happiness clouded by unreality

Clouded reality of modern times. Graphic by Zaksheuskaya

Author and social commentator Rod Dreher is prepping his next book by studying the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Dreher points out that "in McGilchrist's 2009 book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [we see] in modern times [...] a sharp increase in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, borderline personality disorder, and other diseases associated with under-function of the brain’s right hemisphere, and over-function of the left hemisphere". 

This over-reliance on the left hemisphere is important in understanding why there is so much distress in technologically advanced societies. Dreher highlights the following section of McGilchrist's book ("hypo" means "under", "beneath", "down"), saying that McGilchrist writes that we find modern people are increasingly distressed by... 

   
Philosopher Mary Midgeley wrote an admiring review of McGilchrist's book in the Guardian in 2010. She said of it:

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.

McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. 

[...] it is always Right’s business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence. 

Further:

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. 

 Dreher notes:

The book goes on to talk about how we have created a culture that conditions us to accept alienation, decontextualization, disembodiment, and fragmentation, because that is how the left hemisphere construes the world.

That this is causing distress generally is apparent from the statements of practitioners in mental health care, such as David Rettew, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director of Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon. He writes:

A number of mental health clinics across the country, including ours, have recently seen an influx of adolescents who are presenting with self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder and claiming that within themselves there are a number of different personalities that emerge at different times. Much of this seems to be driven by a small number of influential people on TikTok who have posted very popular videos in which they describe their DID in great detail.

Rettew says it's appropriate to "worry that simple dismissals of these adolescents as simply [my stress - BS] acting out the latest 'fad' miss an opportunity to work with significant mental health challenges, even if their expression is being shaped through social media".

Here, from TikTok, is one such adolescent who says her other personality wants the pronouns of paint/paintself.

Dreher:

It seems to me that this would be an example of the kind of thing one would expect in a culture that rewards this kind of insanity. Similarly with the transgender fad, it is impossible to believe that gender dysphoria, a real psychological condition that was observed in a vanishingly small number of people until a short time ago, is in the current moment not a symptom of advanced cultural breakdown along the lines Dr. McGilchrist discusses in The Master and His Emissary. 

This thread of discovery continues in greater detail in McGilchrist's 2021 book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

A reviewer of this text - two volumes long - states that McGilchrist is leading a "revolution" in regaining an understanding of who we are as human beings because we have "become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us".   

To add to the awareness of our precarious situation under the waves of scientism, for the wont of a better term, that have been sweeping over us, I want to provide McGilchrist's own words, by means of screenshots of the Kindle version of The Matter With Things as provided in Dreher's blog here.

McGilchrist writes in The Matter of Things about the lost path to personal peace:

 

We have the cultural elite to thank for much of this mess through its acceptance of styles of thought that make each person the sovereign of what they accept as reality, and its rigid adherence to ideologies that are based more on what is fashionable than on what is logically compelling. These elements, and the moral weakness at the heart of each person, combine to exclude a greater reality, which extends from human experience, to the nature of the world that we inhabit, and ultimately, to the God who created us with the purpose of developing communion not conflict, and from that, deriving a meaning that enables us to live our life to the fullest.

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