I guess the issue I have with these recent chapters is that I'm pretty sure I'm already doing what McGilchrist advocates (integration of the LH and RH) and avoiding what he criticizes (over-reliance on the LH). Therefore, the advice and criticism seem a bit obvious to me -- for example, the
false belief that we must transcend the human in order to approach truth is both in itself irrational, and leads, as I suggested, to exaggerated claims for the truths of science and to a narrow sense of reason that equally misleads.
No worries. I'm a person who believes that the substance-in-relation of personhood is the ultimate category, and that we are the image and likeness of the metacosmic Person(s). So, I'm not only avoiding what he criticizes, but probably going way beyond the recommended dose of RH fairy dust.
It almost sounds like he's a recovering LH trying to help other LH people by taking baby steps toward RH retrieval and recovery: Leftoholics Anonymous?
I once wrote a post about that, but it was about -wings and not -brains per se. Actually, it was called Apparatchiks Anonymous, and I'll bet it's not even funny, being that political cosmody ages poorly. Here's the 12-step Program:
1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent egoic fantasies of total control could restore us to true liberalism.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Source and Guarantor of our liberty.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.
5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN, the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty undo our college education and remove all these defects of ideology.
7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the NY Times.
8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes our government programs had harmed, and became willing to make amends by ignoring their constant whining, and preferably laughing at them.
9. Made direct amends to such people by realizing we have nothing to apologize for.
10. Continued to take a personal inventory, and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, just got drunk instead.
11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty through prayer, meditation, and listening to Rush Limbaugh.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other leftists, even if it meant being denied tenure, disinvited to dinner parties, unfriended, and generally slimed by our intellectual inferiors.
Now, one new thing we are learning is that ideology is indeed firmly lodged in the LH, so it certainly seems that recovering from leftism (or from any other ideology) means undoing or escaping or transcending LH capture and confinement, and paying attention to the RH for a change. But
By definition, psychologists belong to a class of people who generally like taking things apart to see how they work, and therefore intuitively dislike the idea that results can be had without working explicitly through logical steps.
Oh really? Not this psychologist, for truly truly, I am at the other extreme, in that I like to put things together to see how they work, i.e., integrate and synthesize. It's just how I'm built.
For example, the portentous title of my doctoral dissertation -- which, in a way, I've never stopped writing -- was Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Physics, and The Emerging Paradigm of Evolution: Toward a Rapprochement of Mind and Nature.
In the dissertation I was literally trying to integrate everything, only my everything was smaller back then than it is today. You could say the Book was another stab at it, and that the blog consists of 4,000 additional stabs.
Which just goes back to the point that I'm already doing what McGilchrist advocates, only overdoing it.
He describes an ideal that would involve a kind of movement from RH --> LH --> RH, and here again, I'm pretty sure this is what I do, and never stop doing, like a nonlocal ascending spiral or something. He quotes Jonas Salk, who said
when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I've checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure it's still all right.
Same.
But why do they hate us? Maybe because intuition is
a threat to a world-picture based on administration, adherence to ordained procedures, the power of technology, and belief in the superiority of abstract mentation over embodied being. And to the reductionist, the power of intuition is also a threat that must be "debunked."
Well, debunk this. No RH justice, no LH peace!
10 comments:
He describes an ideal that would involve a kind of movement from RH --> LH --> RH
Makes sense; going back to painting or drawing, at varying points you have to look at it in different ways to be sure the composition makes sense: stepping in close, stepping farther back, turning it up-side down or sideways, closing one eye and then the other, and squinting so that the whole looks blurred. You know it's going the right direction when all of those different viewpoints are in harmony.
Re the attempt to integrate everything, I am reminded of an observation that keeps bugging me; why do theologians often write systematic theologies but philosophers do not write systematic philosophies?
Because Kant won't let them?
To your point, why is so hard to concede that Kant is incoherent? Is it just because then we'd have to also admit that the ancients were correct and that the last few centuries have been a fustercluck?
I once saw a debate over which had killed the most people, socialism or capitalism. Socialism seems the obvious answer, but the anti-capitalist had some good points and made it a good fight. Then the anti-religion guy showed up and blew them both away.
In later years I figured out that socialism, capitalism, and religion all fail, at the end of very different days, because nobody has ever figured out how to solve the human power equation. No matter what the utopian intentions, mission statements, or powerfully pious prophecies, the wrong people always get into power and like a virus, destroy their host.
Everybody knows that people are born with the will to have power over their own lives. It’s called the survival instinct. And then the way that power games are played and who it is that power games most often reward, Dark Triad types usually, wind up in control. People like that couldn’t care less about any ideology. Reality is their only focus. Their own reality. And there’s nothing more intoxicating to them than controlling everything, and nothing defines control more than the ability to destroy. It’s an elegant psycho-social theory if one considers all the variables.
So what does this have to do with Christianity? According belief, a life on this earth is but a speck of dust and then an incomprehensibly infinite eternal life awaits. What non-Christian observers are wondering, is why oh why do you focus so much of your energy onto this little speck of dust? (Well, maybe not Bob with all the metaphysical reading he does but all the far more public sinning being done either in the name of God, or with a shrugging “Well, everybody sins but God speaks through me. Really he does.”)
They wonder why you aren’t putting all of your energies into achieving eternal heaven? Or why second to that, you don’t attack any and all satanic attempts at the acquisition of power regardless of politics or religion? Why choose sides and not attack sin itself? Methinks you might save an eternal soul or two that way. At least until somebody solves the human power equation.
Good question, but I think it goes much deeper than Kant, since the average person couldn't care less about some egghead philosopher. There's something in human nature, in our language, in our religion (especially post-Luther), and in our civilization that caused it.
(In response to Randy.)
Randy said "...why do theologians often write systematic theologies but philosophers do not write systematic philosophies?"
Philosophers (lovers of wisdom) do, Misosophers (haters of wisdom) do not. The bitter seeds that Bacon, Descartes, and Rousseau planted, came to fruition in Kant, who, writing not what he thought was real and true, but a too clever by half tome to counter (though he believed it) Hume's skepticism, wrote what is the embodiment of LH thinking - he devised a system that couldn't be exposed as false by what is real and true, by forever putting what is real and true beyond our reach. One effect of that, is that all points made by modern misosophers, must be made within a limited scope of issues, as a broad and comprehensive effort would necessarily invoke the very thing that Kant banished from respectable conversation: what is real and true.
And of course, Kant, even though most of his points are now disputed or denied by modernists, his fundamentals are fundamental to every position that modernists adhere to, every one of which must reject and deride any characterization of what is truly real and true. You Kant remove Kant from modernity, without rejecting and abandoning modernity and thereby exposing yourself to what is real and true.
Like vampires willingly exposing themselves to the sun - it just ain't gonna happen.
Van:
Agreed, with one other name I'd add to the list of the seed planters: Hume.
Randy, yep... or at least a fertilizer.
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