Second Look at Witch Trials?

If you saw the CNN townhall last night, the Nasty Woman who hosted it is the perfect image of LH tyranny imposing its ideological grid over the world. It's like an alarm went off in her head every time Trump strayed from it. She makes Michelle Obama look fun.

Men who do this are grating enough, but when a woman does it... Frankly, it reminds me of the book we discussed a few months back, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. 

I don't have time enough this morning to dive back down that rabbit hole, but I may review it later today in light of hemispheric differences. Something about these primordial Karens was perceived as toxic to society. Who knows, maybe it was a hyper-aggressive LH.

It also reminds me of a Steven Wright joke: If a man speaks in the forest and no women are present, is he wrong? 

To reset where we are in The Matter With Things, we're wrapping up the final chapter of Part One, The Hemispheres and the Means to Truth, and about to get into Part Two, The Hemispheres and the Paths to Truth. The title of the first chapter of Part Two asks the little question, What is Truth?

But first we need to finish up the chapter on what severe mental illness can tell us about hemispheric differences.

One more bit of housekeeping: a reader emailed me to let me know he's enjoying our deep dive into the book, adding that McGilchrist "appears to be an important contemporary thinker -- mind you, he’s no Schuon or Dávila, but he certainly helps pave the way to a higher metaphysical perspective for those who are called to go deeper."

I couldn't agree more. Later it will fall upon me -- since no one else can be bothered -- to attempt to reconcile McGilchrist with perennial philosophy and religion, and I do notice a kind of psychic declension that occurs when he discusses philosophy per se. It's as if it takes place in a lower dimension, using the tools available to him. 

This is not a criticism. But unless anchored in a higher principle, philosophy will be subject to the same limitations of any manmade ideology. Philosophy cannot transcend philosophy except by means of something "exterior" to it. Grace takes many forms, including intellectual. 

It is this x-factor that separates an Aquinas or Schuon from any purely secular philosopher. And this difference can be perceived experientially -- as if it is an RH phenomenon, only cranked up to 11.

Then again, Schuon or Aquinas or Dávila alway write about the latter with the most lucid language conceivable, which implies that the LH too must also be cranked to 11. It's easy enough to have all sorts of RH intuitions but write about them in a flabby, imprecise, or deepakish way, just as it's easy to posit an LH ideology with maximum precision. 

Of the latter, it reminds me of a story McGilchrist tells of a museum curator who informs visitors that a particular dinosaur is exactly nine million and six years old. When asked how he knows this, the curator replies that the dinosaur was nine million years old when he began working there six years ago. 

Yesterday we alluded to the LH matrix to which people are more susceptible than ever, especially those who are exposed to higher education:

The world becomes self-enclosed in such a way that symbols refer to other symbols, signs to other signs, ideas to other ideas, language to other language, without so to speak breaking out of this hermetic space to what lies beyond (emphasis mine).

But enough about the Nasty Woman on CNN.

Note the italicized passage: that is exactly what I was referring to above when I said that Philosophy cannot transcend philosophy except by means of something "exterior" to it. 

It also goes to what we said about the limitations of LH language divorced from RH experience: "words can lose their purchase on reality and begin simply to refer endlessly to one another," to such an extent that you may even find yourself confined to a postmodern humanities department, totally detached from reality.

Every once in awhile McGilchrist touches on the centrality of relation, which is when he comes close to the One Cosmos view. For example he talks about "a loss of connexion between mind and world," and with it, "the loss of betweenness." 

Now, betweenness is somewhat difficult to conceptualize, perhaps because the LH thinks of it as a kind of space between concepts. But in my view, betweenness is as real, or more real, than what it links. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but this is what is seen when we put on our trinitarian spooktacles.   

Another key point:

Only the right hemisphere is able to see that what seem to be opposites coexist and are necessary to one another -- indeed, that by stepping beyond mere opposition, and excluding neither, a new unity can be attained.

That's a bingo, and it goes to all sorts of primordial complementarities, from wave and particle in physics, to one and three in the Godhead, to LH and RH in between.

McGilchrist mostly avoids politics, at least explicitly. But the chapter ends with this little nugget: "once the theoretical mind is untethered" and no longer grounded in the real (RH) world "there is simply no basis for discriminating truth from untruth." 

For example, we might see "belief systems driven by the irrationality of identity politics, which lead subjects to doubt everything except the validity of a bizarre conclusion which they feel driven to accept," while never doubting their own belligerent LH certitudes.

But enough about that nasty woman on CNN.