Time Sickness and Historical Consciousness

The nature -- or at least appearance -- of time changes as a result of certain temporary states, but also certain acquired traits. 

By the latter, for example, there is "historical consciousness," which animals do not possess, and which some humans barely possess at all. Or, to the extent that they do possess it, it's a kind of expansive projection of the momentary. 

Like journalists, who simultaneously know nothing while pretending at omniscience. Which is one of the reasons why they are so irritating. Reason for hope, however: a majority of Americans now agree that the media is an "enemy of the people," the rest being bereft of historical consciousness themselves.

Imagine someone who watches a national news broadcast and doesn't want to vomit. What a strange person, almost a different species of human!

Symmetry: note how, for the left, history is an enemy of the people. Which is why they're forever rewriting (or better, de-writing, censoring, and distorting it based again on the Fierce Urgency of the Now, or what we call Historical Retardation). 

Just to reset, we're up to chapter 22 of The Matter With Things, called simply Time. I have my own ideas about the subject, but we'll never finish the book if I go off on every tangential squirrel.

Now, history is in the right hemisphere, journalism (or the Narrative) in the left hemisphere. That's a good example of a tangential squirrel in Bobville, since McGilchrist doesn't say that. But he makes me think it when he discusses these two modes of time:

In the first, time is frozen, and spatialized in its representation by the analytical intellect and by language, delivering a world which is sliced and fragmented; in the second, it is forever presencing to our intuition and our embodied cognition.... 

In the first, time is effectively denied, and life drained of meaning; in the second, both time -- and, with it, life -- are affirmed and celebrated.

Again, LH and RH, respectively. 

This is another one of those concepts that I've thought about before, but just never thought about grounding in neurology. 

More generally, I think we're talking here about a convergent reality that different thinkers simply approach with different vocabularies and nomenclatures. Way back in grad school I learned to characterize this distinction as PS <---> D, and it is central to what we call "psychological maturity."

I shall be brief: you could call PS <---> D a kind of metabolism of the mind that forms the basis of insight: the movement from PS to D "gives coherence to what is dispersed and introduces order into disorder," and represents an integration of more fundamental or primordial elements.

Now, imagine someone -- a journalist, for example -- inhabiting some rigid and dysfunctional D-world narrative. For him, he will have to undergo a period of confusing PS in order to reassemble himself (and reality) at a higher and deeper level. In short, he'll have to get worse before getting better.

Then (we're still back in grad school) I stumbled upon another thinker who applied this scheme to historical consciousness. Long story short, this is why a mature person will have a much more accurate and integrated narrative about his own past, but also (I think) about history more generally (at least in potential).

For certain immature patients, "History is instantaneously rewritten" and "The present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present" -- which sounds exactly like what McGilchrist would characterize as an RH ---> LH movement. Sorry about all these symbols, but it is very much as if PS <---> D = LH <---> RH.

Come to think of it, the D in PS <---> D actually stands for Depressive, and McGilchrist also happens to situate both subclinical (or realistic) and clinical depression in the RH. 

Why might this be? I would say because reality is a bit sobering, to say the least, if not a bit depressing per se. My people (psychoanalytic folk) would say that maturity involves tolerating depression as opposed to running away from it (which is called mania, or a manic defense).

And sure enough, McGilchrist notes that in mania, "the left frontal pole is dominant," "whereas in melancholy... the right frontal pole is dominant." So, neurology confirms the folk wisdom of my people.

Conversely, PS may be more "persecutory," but it is preferable to tolerating the depression that would occur if the person were honest with himself. You've no doubt noticed the emotional immaturity of progressive activists of various kinds, from Greta Thunberg to AOC to Keith Olbermann. 

Yes, they are constantly paranoid and persecuted and angry (PS world) but imagine what would happen if they were to stop projecting their primitive psychic elements and had to tolerate them instead: depression.

That's enough of that squirrel.  

In another passage, McGilchrist compares time to music, which we've done on many occasions. In fact, I've likewise suggested that we are drawn to music because it reflects the nature of temporal reality. Think of how each note

is only understandable as part of a melody or musical sequence which is appreciated as whole, and where any one note, and those before and after, interpenetrate (McGilchrist).

It's as if the individual notes are PS, the melody D. And yes, music appreciation is very much an RH affair. People with RH damage may even have difficulty recognizing melodies. Which I suppose is why the Narrative is so jarringly discordant to folks like us with sensitive RH hearing.