[John Ehrenfeld]

Here is a guess as to what led McGilchrist to his statement about feudalism. Simplifying greatly, feudalism was all about a structure of caring. The lords or nobles took care of there fiefs. There was no institution that served the common good, other than the lords and their roles were limited to defense, mostly. The concept of rights applied more or less only to the lords. Again oversimplifying, as the idea of rights grew large in the society, some institution would have been needed to define and protect those rights. The feudal structures failed to do that and were ultimately replaced by governments “representing” the people of a polity. A move in the right direction most would say, even Marx saw a form of feudalism as a step towards the complete socialist state. But, in McGilchrist’s terms, the connectedness that held feudal systems together (RH) was replaced by a more abstract set of relationships (LH). Obviously the history of social systems is much more complicated than this, but maybe this very simple story will help us to understand his comment.