The Biological Roots of Our Divided Culture: The Work of Iain McGilchrist

A brain is made up of a left and right hemisphere. r.classen/Shutterstock

Commentary

The single thing our divided culture can agree on is that we can agree on nothing. Left and right, conservative and liberal, traditional and progressive—all our divisions are absolute. We can’t even agree to disagree. We agree only that a gap separates us, one no bridge can span. And yet, many of us continue to attempt reconciliation between these unreconcilable sides or, worse, try to convince the other side that our side is right. In short, the situation is hopeless.

Enter Iain McGilchrist. Mr. McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist and author whose work as a research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University led him to investigate the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. What he found, after writing and reviewing a rich neuroscience literature, was that both hemispheres are necessary to a functioning human but that each has a unique function.

His findings refuted an older, pop-culture view of the hemispheres, in which, for example, the right was “good at poetry” while the left was “good at math” and so forth. In fact, each hemisphere is required for every action, mental and physical, but they serve different functions. The right hemisphere (RH) sees the big picture, while the left hemisphere (LH) handles details. It follows that the RH oversees general experience and behavior, while the LH “isolates and grasps,” making it possible to hunt or buy a hamburger.

To illustrate the difference, Mr. McGilchrist in his book “The Master and His Emissary” (2009) cites the example of a bird (brain division applies throughout much of the animal world) swooping into a field to catch a mouse. While the LH is focusing on the prey to isolate and grasp, the RH is monitoring the scene, looking out for predators, and keeping an eye out for additional prey. So long as the two are coordinated, with the RH in charge (the master) and the LH acting on its orders (the emissary), all is well. But if the LH rebels and attempts to act on its own, things fall apart; “the center cannot hold.” The LH may act recklessly in pursuit of prey without regard to safety.

Mr. McGilchrist makes the case that, in our current cultural condition, the two hemispheres “are engaged in a power struggle,” specifically one in which the LH has usurped the role of the RH, just as the emissary usurps the role of the master in the Nietzschean fable that gave Mr. McGilchrist the title for his book.

Left Hemisphere Versus Right Hemisphere

The list of specific differences in function between RH and LH is long, but here are some items on it, taken from the introduction to Mr. McGilchrist’s most recent exploration of this rich and difficult subject, his 1,597-page, multi-volume study, “The Matter with Things” (2021):

• “The LH is principally concerned with manipulation of the world; the RH with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it.”
• “The LH deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped; the RH with the whole picture, including the periphery or background.”
• “The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.”
• “The LH is superior for fine analytic sequencing and has a larger linguistic vocabulary and more complex syntax than the RH. Pragmatics, the ability to understand the overall import of an utterance in context is, however, [an] RH function.”

The last item is key. The LH can command the structure of language but can’t fully understand it without the RH’s global view. Think of the employment of the term “political rights” to mean the “right” to be the gender of one’s choice or to cross a country’s borders at will. On its own, such demands can be defended by language that employs complex syntax to seemingly make its case, an LH skill. But when examined for semantics, for meaning, and for context (the purview of the RH), the arguments fall apart. In the context of DNA properly understood, people can’t change sex. And national sovereignty doesn’t violate rights but rather protects the rights of those encompassed by it.

The implications of the RH/LH division for thought, for society, for culture, and for politics are staggering. When the RH is in charge, the big picture is kept in view. Society functions to maintain peace and security for all or at least to attempt it. The job of the LH is then to obtain those things that serve the whole. But if the LH begins to act on its own, it may reject the whole for individual or tribal concerns apart from the whole. We see that everywhere today. The LH demands perfection, gratification, and completion; the political left demands an end to all differences among people; reparations for long-ago injustices, both real and imagined; and the immediate institution of rule-by-ideology.

Left Hemisphere and Left Politics

I don’t know Mr. McGilchrist’s politics, nor are they relevant here, and it should be noted that the implications of LH/RH are of such complexity that, between his two books on the subject, Mr. McGilchrist has written more than 2,000 published pages. Nevertheless, a parallel between the LH/RH division and the positions of political left and right strongly suggests itself.

The most compelling example of such a parallel might be this: The RH lends context to everything it does, while the LH is concerned only with what is at hand, isolated from the whole. Likewise, the natural law that is the heart of traditional ontology provides context for moral and political choices on the right, while the left knows no such context; in fact, the denial of nature (and thereby natural law) is its very credo.

It’s pure chance that the term “left hemisphere” aligns with the political bias of what we call the left, as does the term “right hemisphere” with the inclinations of the right. Serendipitous though this nominal alignment is, there’s nonetheless a real connection between LH functions and the political left on the one hand and between RH functions and the political right on the other. To return to the bird imagery above, the left is swooping down on its prey of ending Western values without regard for the wider context of the value systems waiting to replace them: communism, fascism, and radical Islam. It refuses to listen to the context provided by the RH, the context of tradition, ancestry, and reason.

Even reason itself has been twisted to serve the LH. In this regard, Mr. McGilchrist is clear in his condemnation of mainstream Western philosophy since Descartes. The division of experience into “subject” and “object” has led to the isolation of entities from one another. Truth can’t be known, nor can meaning exist, in a universe divided against itself.

Mr. McGilchrist follows certain 20th-century philosophers, including Henri Bergson, A.N. Whitehead, and Martin Heidegger, in understanding experience (Whitehead called it “process") as productive of individual entities, not “subjects” and “objects” as productive of experience. The whole (RH) precedes the individual (LH). Descartes et al. had it reversed, and the past 400 years of steady rot testify to that reversal as error. It’s just this error that Mr. McGilchrist seeks to correct by linking biological fact to cultural truth. In a sense, Mr. McGilchrist can be seen as the philosopher giving biological foundation to the insights of Bergson, Whitehead, and Heidegger.

Nature and Values

Part of the inherently divisive nature of post-Cartesian philosophy is that it refuses to recognize a necessary link between biological truth and values. It’s part of the LH’s material bias that it will not give preference to big-picture, contextual viewpoints over individual or tribal demands. It can’t be proven, the left will say, that, as Mr. McGilchrist puts it, “the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere.”

The LH demands certainty and completion, and the addition of big-picture context to its demands—the observation, for example, that national borders provide protection for the values and belief system of nations—is thrown aside as irrelevant to the prey upon which it wishes to pounce. This circumspection of the RH, compared with the arrogant certainty of the LH, puts the RH at a disadvantage. The LH will always scream louder than the RH, gaining more attention and increasing its power. To this, Mr. McGilchrist concluded that the biggest context of all is what finally matters:

“God situates us firmly in the cosmos ... religion takes seriously both the thisness of the individual, at one end of the scale, and the fate of the cosmos at the other, and shows them to be part of one whole.”

Morality—how we live—matters because of this final, cosmological context:

“Something depends on our way of being, and it is not just we ourselves. ... The how of life, not just the what—its mere existence or non-existence, huge as that it—matters: it has a value and price we cannot fully conceive.”

Life, in other words, has meaning beyond mere existence, a meaning that has been obscured by centuries of bad thinking and worse politics. Mr. McGilchrist offers a way of seeing how we have reached this place by giving in to the LH’s desires over the larger concerns of the RH. If we understand how we have gotten here, it might be possible to chart a course back to the headwaters of our conflict and engage in real reconciliation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.