In summary, [the science is that] the right hemisphere (RH) is wide-ranging, imaginative, creative, poetic, fascinated by the arts; it is prepared to take risks and to go with the flow. The left hemisphere (LH) is meticulous about detail, grammar, spelling, and conventional rules; it loves tools, machines, spreadsheets, and orthodoxy. To summarise: LH loves maps; RH loves exploring the world.
Dr McGilchrist’s diagnosis of the malaise of the modern world is that LH has taken over and tried to eviscerate all RH activity. LH knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
LH thinks that the purpose of education is to train people to be useful workers and, through vigorous competition, to obtain well-paid jobs. RH thinks that education’s purpose is to make fine, happy, creative, mature, morally courageous, emotionally intelligent, co-operative human beings. Margaret Thatcher’s announcement that “There is no such thing as society” is an LH broadside to sink the RH ship called social conscience.
"Ideas have consequences", a statement that has become somewhat of a cliché these days as it posits that how we form the ideas that carry weight in our thinking is a matter of significance to our personal lives and to the functioning of society.
McGilchrist's findings bear close attention, as he and his work are increasingly seen to be insightful given that the manner of reasoning and institutional decision-making in many domains are being found to be unbalanced.
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| Dr Iain McGilchrist ... "our reason is not reasonable enough, it’s too dogmatic" |
What I think happened during the Renaissance was this sudden flowering in which there were great steps forward in so many aspects of life — a great richness. (This is not about the humanities versus the sciences by the way, nor is it true that the humanities are somehow right hemisphere and sciences somehow left hemisphere; good science and good reasoning involve the right hemisphere as much as the left.) Then towards the end of the 17th century came a sense that science had solved all our problems and we were beginning to understand how to control everything ourselves.
Unfortunately, we now believe that if we just had a little bit more power (which is the raison d’etre of the left hemisphere: to grasp, to get) — if only we could do a bit more manipulation — we would solve everything. But at the same time, we’re making an unholy mess of the world in so many respects. We’re destroying nature, we’re destroying humanity. We’re certainly destroying this civilisation. I’d say we’re taking a sledgehammer to it. And so, this is a very sad outcome for this know-it-all left hemisphere.
There are several reasons why I think the left hemisphere has become more potent. One is that it’s the one that makes you rich. It’s the one with which you do the grabbing and getting. Another is that it’s much easier to explain the left hemisphere’s point of view: “If we do this, it leads to that.” When you start to openly analyse what your civilisation is about, rather than getting on with it, then you lean more and more into this left hemisphere point of view. A.N. Whitehead, who I consider one of the all-time greatest philosophers, said: “A civilisation flourishes until it starts to analyse itself.” And that’s remarkable because Whitehead was a mathematician and a physicist, but he was able to see the limitations of science and reason.
I happen to believe our science is not scientific enough. It’s too dogmatic. I happen to believe our reason is not reasonable enough, it’s too dogmatic — and it’s dogma that’s always the problem. We need science, we need reason, but we also need to see that they can’t answer all our questions. Love is very real. Anyone who’s experienced it knows that it’s one of the realest things that can happen to you — but according to science, for it to be real, you’ve got to be able to see it in the lab, measure it, manipulate it.
'The Machine' becomes dogmatic
McGilchrist has observed that in history there has been corrections one way or the other but the Industrial Revolution has been a key influence on the world we live in today:
[..]the power of the Industrial Revolution led to this machine-like way of thinking about living things, and we’ve never really lost that.
There are great artists in Modernism and Postmodernism. But it’s interesting: the ways of seeing the world that normally would only happen to somebody who had an injury in the right hemisphere began to be represented in the visual arts in the 20th century. There’s a wonderful book called Madness and Modernism about this topic, showing how things you find in schizophrenia are now happening, and are being portrayed in our culture.
It’s not that we’ve all got schizophrenia — of course we haven’t — but what I think is that we’re all neglecting the right hemisphere. Schizophrenia is a case in which the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right hemisphere has been wound down or is not really being listened to, and this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world which is fully deluded. We’re all fairly reasonable people, but now it’s quite common to hear people say — and for them to go completely unchallenged — things that everybody knows are completely impossible. They don’t have any science behind them. [My emphasis - BS]
There are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic. “This is right, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.” That’s the way the left hemisphere likes to be. Cut and dried, black and white. But the right hemisphere sees nuances, gradation: there’s good and bad in almost everything.
The dogmatic nature of society's thought processes are unprecedented, McGilchrist notes, and he goes on to identify why this is:
I’d like to make a distinction, by the way, between what I would call a rationalistic approach and being reasonable. Being reasonable was something I remember from when I was growing up. There were reasonable people and they were admired. The idea of education was to make you reasonable. But now, that has been supplanted by something quite different: a rationalising framework such as a computer could follow. So we’ve been pushed by the increasing sophistication of machines — the intoxicating feeling that we have power over the world — into viewing the world in this reductionist, materialist way. And the trouble with power is that it’s only as good as the wisdom of the person who wields it. And I don’t notice that we’re getting wiser. In fact, I think that would be an understatement. So it’s rather like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers and then hoping there’s going to be a happy outcome.
So we’re not living in an age of reason, after all?
We’re living in an age of rationalising and reductionism in which everything can be taken apart. I suppose there was an almost equivalent period — it was very short lived — of Puritanism, when it was absolutely not tolerated for you to disagree with a certain way of thinking — which was, in fact, a very dogmatic, reduced, abstracted way of thinking. But I think at that point, we hadn’t reached the stage that we’re at now. Because at that time in history, people lived close to nature. Most people belonged to an inherited culture, a coherent culture. Art had not been turned into something conceptual, but was visceral and moving. Religion had not been presented as something that only a fool or an infant would believe. These are all very arrogant positions that we now hold.
We know that some things are key to human flourishing: proximity to nature; a culture; some sense of something beyond this realm. They make people healthier, both physically and mentally. We’ve done away with that and now all we’re left with is public debate.
How to escape our self-made prison
We can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature. I think we also need to reestablish some sense of who we are and what we’re doing here. Although we’ve got all this power, and machines that can “think”, they can’t think at all, they can only process information extremely rapidly. We’re not really wise.One of my answers, when people say, “What should we do?”, is pray. And by that, I don’t mean, as Heidegger said, “Only God can save us now.” I don’t mean that God will suddenly come down with his divine hand, sort everything out, and it’ll all be okay. That’s not going to happen. What I mean is that we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world; that we have some humility; that we re-kindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder, in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them down, vilifying them, telling them they’re frightful, but reasonably talking and saying, “Okay, you disagree with me. I’m interested, explain your point of view.” What we mustn’t do is follow the strident shrieking voices, whatever they may be saying.
That there is a prison ready to hold us captive, one of our own making, is demonstrated by a global survey that has just published findings. The survey asked more than 42,000 respondents in 26 countries across continents questions based on the four dimensions of health: mental, physical, social, and spiritual. Note that the focus is on the so-called Gen Z age group, that is, those between the ages of 18 and 24. The survey report states:
According to the McKinsey Health Institute 2022 Global Gen Z survey, those between the ages of 18 and 24 report poorer spiritual health than older generations, with Gen Z respondents almost three times more likely than baby boomers to report poor or very poor spiritual health.
Spiritual health enables people to integrate meaning in their lives. Spiritually healthy people have a strong sense of purpose. While people who are experiencing poor mental health could have good spiritual health, or vice versa, Gen Z individuals who experienced poor mental health were five times more likely to report poor spiritual health than those with neutral or good mental health.
A crucial finding: "In most surveyed countries, a higher share of Gen Z survey respondents report poor mental, social, and spiritual health compared with other generations." The survey finds that:
Although many individuals around the world are struggling with their health, there are meaningful differences within groups.
Globally, one in seven baby boomers say their mental health has declined over the past three years, compared with one in four Gen Z respondents. Female Gen Zers were almost twice as likely to report poor mental health when compared with their male counterparts (21 percent versus 13 percent, respectively).
In most surveyed countries, a higher proportion of Gen Z respondents said their mental health was poor or very poor when compared with other dimensions of health (16 percent in Gen Z and 7 percent for baby boomers). However, in China, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, Gen Z respondents reported that they struggled most with their social health. Overall, mental health experiences varied by region, with Gen Z participants in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Nigeria rating their mental health as “very good” with the highest frequencies.
While Gen Z tends to report worse mental health, the underlying cause is not clear. There are several age-specific factors that may impact Gen Z’s mental health independent of their generational cohort, including developmental stage, level of engagement with healthcare, and familial or societal attitudes.
This report did, however, investigate the role of social media:
Gen Zers, on average, are more likely than other generations to cite negative feelings about social media. They are also more likely to report having poor mental health. But correlation is not causation, and our data indicates that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex.
We need to go to the likes of Jonathan Haidt's research to get a firmer grasp of how social media are such an important cause of distress among young people:
A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.
From that horrendous set of statistics Haidt is confident enough to declare:
There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.
A final word as to the arrogance that governs much of the thinking within technology and science, and the dangers that that governing ideology creates, we take note of the alarm sounded today about a world where AI is pushed into territory without boundaries set with humanity's common good in mind.
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