When I saw that my colleague Sebastian Morello had been to the Isle of Skye to interview Iain McGilchrist, and had returned with a documentary of their talk, my feeling was, “Jack this straight into my veins.” If you don’t know who Iain McGilchrist is, then the TEC feature-length interview with him is a marvelous place to start. True, you could listen to it as a podcast, but then you would miss the glory of the mountainous Scots island where the rumpled intellectual dwells in his coastal redoubt.
I am an unreserved fanboy of Dr. McGilchrist, whom I consider to be one of the most important intellectuals of this moment. His writing and thinking plays a major role in my forthcoming book about Christian re-enchantment; indeed, if the book does nothing more than serve as a gateway to McGilchrist, it will have accomplished a great deal. If you want to understand the many-symptomed sickness that has overtaken modern culture, and begin finding our way to a cure, there is perhaps no better secular guide than the gentle, bearded psychiatrist, a lover of art, poetry, and music who argues profoundly that these things are the therapies that, no kidding, can save our civilization.
McGilchrist developed his basic argument in the widely praised 2009 book The Master and His Emissary. In it, McGilchrist discusses differences in the hemispheric functions of the brain, and what they have to do with the development of culture.
Though rejecting a superficial model in which the left hemisphere handles abstract reasoning, and the right hemisphere serves as the locus of emotion and intuition, McGilchrist nevertheless demonstrates that the two hemispheres play different, complementary roles in cognition. Broadly, the right brain (the Master) receives raw sensory data, and refers it to the left brain (the Emissary) for analysis. In a properly functioning brain, the left hemisphere sends its analysis back to the right brain for integration into a model of the whole.
In modern times, though, Western man has become stuck in his left brain. That is, we remain locked in the abstract analysis mode, and have convinced ourselves that this distorted view gives us the most truthful picture of the real world. We have done this in part because the left brain is arrogant, and does not know what it does not know (or, as McGilchrist has it, the right brain knows what the left brain is up to, but the left is in the dark about the right). We have also done this because to regard the world abstractly has made us rich and powerful.
How? By turning the material world into mere “stuff” we can mold according to our will. Beginning in the late medieval period, Western man began to reject the ancient philosophical idea that meaning inhered in nature. Crudely put, there is no intrinsic meaning there, if all matter is “dead,” and what really matters is the spirit (or mind), then we can do whatever we like with the natural world.
It is no accident, says McGilchrist, that the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution came along at more or less the same time. These are manifestations of a more disembodied, left-brain way of seeing the world. The entire modern history of Western culture—through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed—is what you get from an intellect that values quantity over quality, that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
In the 21st century, through science, technology, and the genius of capitalism, we have established control over the natural world to a degree our early modern ancestors would have scarcely dreamed possible—but, says McGilchrist, we are lost in the cosmos, and driving ourselves mad. He means this literally, showing that hemispheric imbalances such as are reflected in Western culture today are clinically associated with schizophrenia and related mental disorders.
All that is prelude to the psychiatrist and philosopher’s 2021 magnum opus, The Matter With Things which is like The Lord Of The Rings to its predecessor’s The Hobbit. That is, the two-volume doorstopper weighing over seven pounds builds on the earlier book to offer nothing less than a theory of reality. The day will come when this book is regarded in the same way we think of Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age.
It is hard to summarize a book as complex as The Matter With Things, a book of popular science and cultural analysis that is intimidatingly long. Yet to commit to reading a work like this (which the author’s lovely prose makes easier than you might think) is to understand why McGilchrist could not reduce it. He is dealing with the most fundamental things of human life and experience in its pages.
The argument goes like this: the picture of reality taken as objectively true by the modern mind, under the tyranny of the left brain, is, in fact, seriously distorted—and is killing us. This is something we all feel.
“Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula,” he writes—a formula that includes rejecting all transcendent values, and even the possibility that they might exist.Yet we moderns still insist that our scientific, materialist way of knowing, a way that has brought us far more control over our lives, is the only valid way—a grave mistake that prevents us from doing what we must to restore ourselves to health. McGilchrist puts it like this:
We are like someone who, having found a magnifying glass a revelation in dealing with pond life, insists on using it to gaze at the stars – and then solemnly declares that if only people in the past had had such a wonderful magnifying glass to look through, they’d have known that, on closer inspection, stars don’t actually exist at all.
The Matter With Things goes deep into epistemology (how we know what we know), quantum physics, and theory of mind, while never marooning the narrative in the swamp of sludgy academic prose. The book is a powerful refutation of ‘nothing-buttery’—of the idea that reality is nothing but the sum total of its parts. It contends brilliantly that Occam’s Razor—the claim that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is probably the best one—is a cognitive tool with which the modern world is slitting its throat.
McGilchrist’s genius is to use science to reach conclusions that are both poetic and—though this is not a book about God—religious. He writes:
The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent. Once again, this leaves no room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.
In my work on trying to find a way out of the postmodern dark wood, Iain McGilchrist has been something of a Virgil. Though he has not written a religious work, his long conclusion takes the reader right up to the threshold of faith not as an escape from reality or a therapeutic consolation for its pains, but as a reliable way of knowing the big-T Truth.
“Truth is subjectivity,” Kierkegaard famously said. He did not mean that truth is whatever one wants to believe it is. Rather, the 19th century Danish philosopher, challenging the cerebral abstractions of the Enlightenment, indicated that the kinds of truths for which a man would live and die can only be known subjectively, through a passionate commitment of the entire self—not by standing on the bank of the river rationalizing about it, but by diving in and participating in its flow. The Matter With Things can be read as a vast and thrilling attempt to marshal science to support Kierkegaard’s bold claim.
In the end, the genial professor who Sebastian Morello visits at his damp Hebridean retreat is a sly enchanter—or, to be precise, a re-enchanter. Disenchantment is not a matter of reality having had a layer of fairy dust blown away by modernity, but something much deeper: a loss of meaning, purpose, and direction. Most people who have thought about it for more than five minutes understand that meaning that one has consciously constructed (as opposed to discovered) is not meaning at all.
McGilchrist does not denigrate science as a way of knowing, but only puts it in its proper place. We can know the truths that make life purposeful primarily, though not exclusively, through art, poetry, and, yes, religion: modes of encountering the world that do not negate the rational, but rather complete it. Iain McGilchrist is a physician who is really a metaphysician, a scientist with the soul of a poet, and exactly the public intellectual we need in such a time as this.
