What Have We Unlearned?

As we come to the conclusion of Part One, what have we learned? First, that hemispheric differences "are stark in every area relevant to making sense of the world," and that -- this I wouldn't have guessed -- "the LH is, compared with the RH, unreliable in just about every way that matters."

McGilchrist compares the LH to a (perhaps basement-dwelling, ice cream-licking)

high-ranking bureaucrat, protected from the world which he or she must administrate: adept at knowing and observing the rules, but knowing little if anything about life as it is lived there.

I remember the first time I was thrown in with a live patient. I had my LH theories, but as I became more confident, I pretty much tossed them out. 

In this regard, I was very much influenced by a fellow named W.R. Bion, who, now that I think about it, was all about not conflating the map with the territory. If I'm not careful this could easily descend into a whole post, so I'll try to find a suitable passage and move on.

Bion considers that stereotypes, the therapist's fantasies of omnipotence, and this tendency to cling to theoretical a priori knowledge are the analyst's chief reactions in the face of the something new and unknown that appears in every analytic session.

Essentially, you want to avoid premature closure of the epistemological field by superimposing a superficial LH answer to tamp down the anxiety of not knowing.

But not knowing (or unKnowing) is good. Every morning I wake up not knowing and following where it leads. As we know, the more we want to find out, the more we must fuck around in the cosmos (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EYEDD2l0YUw). I didn't make up the rules.

I suppose the main thing I'm discovering is that the progressive Matrix is the result of a detached and isolated LH. 

A commenter to yesterday's post mentions that conservatives typically accuse progressives of being plunged into a world of feelings, while we are the rational, logical, and empirical ones. There's still truth in this, only now with a twist, for the irrational things the left gets so hysterical about are lodged in the LH. We'll have much more to say about this as we proceed.

To repeat a passage from a couple of posts back,

When you are out of touch with reality you will easily embrace a delusion, and equally put in doubt the most basic elements of existence [like whether you are a boy or girl]. 

If this reminds you of the mindset of the present day materialist science and the socio-political debate, we should not be particularly surprised, since they show all the signs of attending with the LH (McGilchrist). 

Which in turn reminds me of an observation by Russell Kirk that conservatism can never be an ideology, rather, the absence of ideology. This doesn't mean there are no conservative ideologues, only that they betray conservatism by reducing it to an LH formula.  

I'm just flipping around a book called The Essential Russell Kirk, and there is this eloquent description of what amounts to an RH grounded life:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning... and under every deep a lower deep opens. 

Straight-up Gödel.

Thaaat's right, Petey.  

For [Kirk], schism of the soul and schism of the community have a distinctly mutual relationship...

And perhaps these schisms are grounded in one between the hemispheres.

The decline of moral habit produces, in its first stage, a rigid and exalted moralism; and in its second, an immoralism raised to the level of doctrine; sooner or later, it invariably gives birth to the lowest level of immorality.

And here we are: an unstable combination of "rigid and exalted" LH moralism and utterly immoral anarchy unleashed at the border, in our cities, and in the judicial system.

In an essay called The Idea of Conservatism, Kirk lays out principles that clearly reflect an RH<-->LH harmony, such as the existence of "a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Let's just say the isolated LH in principle has no direct knowledge of the transcendent order to which we are always dialectically ordered.

 End of Part One.