The sinister side of lie in the West - book review
Lance
Western World. By Iain McGilchrist. Yale University Press; 608 pages;
$38 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
“I THUS drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery
I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly
one, but truly two.” So said Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll. Iain
McGilchrist, a former Oxford literary scholar, now a doctor and
psychiatrist, has reached a similar conclusion about the duality of
man, and he too feels somewhat shipwrecked about it.
According to Mr McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres of the
human brain have opposing personalities which have been at war ever
since the time of Plato, and especially since the Enlightenment. The
brain’s left hemisphere (the “Emissary” of his title) is the villain
of the piece, since it has wrested control from the right (the
“Master”, who ought to be in charge). The upstart left hemisphere has
created a dehumanised society in the West, contributed to epidemics of
schizophrenia and autism, caused environmental despoliation, and given
rise to some wilfully ugly modernist art and music into the bargain.
The relationship between the two sides of the brain became a hot topic
in the 1960s after a spate of operations on epilepsy patients to sever
the main connections between their hemispheres. These “split-brain”
subjects generally found that their fits became less debilitating, and
they functioned normally in everyday life. But when experimenters
found ways to feed information to just one of their disconnected
hemispheres, such bizarre things started to happen that some
researchers reckoned they were dealing with two independent spheres of
consciousness in a single person. In recent decades a great deal more
about the sides of the brain has been learned, mainly by studying
stroke patients, and from imaging techniques that reveal which parts
of the brain are most active when performing various tasks.
Mr McGilchrist dismisses the pop-science idea that the left brain is
rational, dull and male, while the right is creative, impressionistic
and female. Almost everything once thought to happen in just one
hemisphere turns out to involve both, and the differences between them
concern not what the brain does, but the way it does things. In
particular, he says, the left specialises in narrowly focused
attention, while the right attends to broader contexts.
That, at any rate, is his cautious, official position, and he gives
intriguing evidence to back it up. But the reader is also treated to
some very loose talk and to generalisations of breathtaking sweep. The
left’s world is “ultimately narcissistic”; its “prime motivation is
power”, and the Industrial Revolution was, in some mysterious sense,
the left’s “most audacious assault yet on the world of the right
hemisphere”. The sainted right, by contrast, has “ideals” that are in
harmony with an “essentially local, agrarian, communitarian, organic”
conception of democracy.
In a tour of Western intellectual history that takes up half of this
large book, Mr McGilchrist describes broad movements and famous
figures as if they were battles and soldiers in a 2,500-year war
between the brain’s hemispheres. Romanticism was mostly a victory for
the right brain; the Enlightenment, in the end, a victory for the
left. Shakespeare was a general of the right-hemisphere party, because
of his celebration of the uncategorisable variety of human character;
Descartes was a champion of the sinister camp, because of his
mechanistic reductionism. A scintillating intelligence is at work in
this part of the book, particularly in the discussions of poetry, but
it has plainly become untethered from its moorings in brain science.
Mr McGilchrist claims that the allegedly sharp dichotomy between left-
and right-hemisphere thinking does not exist in Asian cultures, or not
in the same way. But he offers no evidence that such differences can
be explained in physiological terms.
The book ends with a deflating admission that will not surprise those
readers who feel the author’s main claims about the cerebral
hemispheres have the ring of loose analogies rather than hard
explanations. Mr McGilchrist would not be unhappy to learn that what
he has to say about the roles of the hemispheres in Western culture is
simply a metaphor and is not literally true. In other words, he seems
to be in two minds about his own thesis, which is fitting but not
encouraging.
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14959719
Dave Smith
The book sounds rather speculative !
Dave Smith
Peter Brooks
>
> According to Mr McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres of the
> human brain have opposing personalities which have been at war ever
> since the time of Plato,
>
Jaynes's theories on consciousness and the bicameral mind?
Citizen Jimserac
There are two related books that come to mind regarding this, both of
which I read with great interest in my college years (so long ago it
is difficult to remember that far back (though the Pembroke chick,
CET where are you now, seems to stay uuppermost in my recollections).
One was Jaynes' "The Origins of Conciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind" and the other was Arthur Koestler's masterpiece, "The
Act of Creation".
Both books imply that underlying our rational thought processes may
lie an elaborate collection of creative but childlike associations and
interconnections at the most sub-concious levels, associations which
come to be noticed only in the bizarre symbology of dreams (cf. Jung),
the occasional slip of the tongue which ends up being revelatory of
inner or deeply held feelings, and other demonstrations, for example
the gradual rebuilding of a path towards a collection of long term
memories of loved ones by the amnesiac.
I would urge caution on the conclusion that because the underlying
mechanisms of our intelligence may involve involuntary subconscious
associations and other mechanisms hard wired by evolution, we should
regard a fundamental dualism as fundamental to our pysche. Rather,
however complicated, childlike or even Freudian the underlying
processes may be, the end result, in my opinion, is a functional
unity, not duality.
Also, I would hesitate to draw any far reaching conclusions about
western civilisation from such things and if I were to draw any, it
would be from books such as "The End of History and the Last Man" by
Fukiyama which argues for a fundamental desire and movement towards
freedom by people in diverse societies and eras of history rather than
the zomibie like conformity which McGilchrist might be suggesting
(have not read it).
The dehumanizing elements in our civilisation seem to me to be more
related to an undermining of education consequent to the intentional
desire on the part of various exploitative interests to retain control
while perpetuating the myth of their necessity, supposed moral
superiority, and easy justifications for various completely anti-
humanistic initiatives and actions. See the superb book, "The
Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto, a New
York City school teacher who finally figured out who and what was
blocking his teaching and blew the lid off of it. (The entire book
is made available online by the publisher, google for it). This
trend became rather more obvious when companies starting referring to
their "employees" as "human resources", reading scores over a series
of decades before and after World War ll started declining
precipitously, and the machinations of various educational
"foundations" "think" tanks and "social science" experts became more
widely known. See Gatto.
Citizen Jimserac
Dave Smith
>
> - Show quoted text -
I enjoyed 'The Social Brain' , a book by 'brain scientist' Michael
Gazzaniga which discusses the early split-brain research and its
implications.
Dave Smith
Citizen Jimserac
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> I enjoyed 'The Social Brain' , a book by 'brain scientist' Michael
> Gazzaniga which discusses the early split-brain research and its
> implications.
>
> Dave Smith
Have not read it, sounds interesting.
Cit J.