Whit Blauvelt
Forum Replies Created
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Having read through the whole of The Master and The Matter, I don’t see that there’s anything like the full workup of Roman history that would be required to make a substantial case. McGilchrist’s argument seems more a suggestion than a proof.
Volume II of The Matter consists largely of a brilliant collection of quotes from those in recent centuries who’ve observed that there’s much to our world beyond rational grasp — many of the quotes from those such as physicists who’ve extended the rational grasp towards its limits.
Last week I badly bruised one hand, such that it was fully out of use for several days. I was surprised by how many normal acts require two hands. Is the health of a civilization then to be measured by which hand it favors, or is the important measure how well they work together? Are we best with either one the master, or with both in what Jung called the alchemical marriage?
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A few comments, hopefully constructive …
“Craving is an embodied state both physical & emotional” — Okay. But hunger can be a good thing, if it’s for the right foods. The rejection of hunger leads to serious physical and emotional problems. Obviously one can also eat too much. But to crave, say, a bowl of organic fruit, or to crave a stroll in a beautiful landscape … not bad things! Rather essential.
Then “A sense of unease or disquiet … isn’t
considered normal or good enough in our contemporary Capitalist
Democracy.” Some argue that a sense of unease is exactly what capitalism cultivates in us, so that we will go out and buy more to try to fill the emptiness. But when you say “isn’t considered normal,” who is it you have doing the considering? If one is uneasy about some problem, and then finds a solution, one feels easier in that moment. Thus both unease and ease have their place is a good and productive life.If we’re to be constructive here, what would you like to construct? Do you wish to become more at ease with unease, at a meta level? Do you have cravings which make you uneasy when satisfied, or when not satisfied? I don’t wish to be the Devil’s advocate here; just trying to follow through on the themes you’ve brought to this discussion.
Best,
Whit -
And seriously, you’re claiming that AI will better represent the “Master” (RH) than we can in our own persons?
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A true master harmonizes the faculties, vision and feeling alongside language, and composes a self from their weave. The Enlightenment was one with the Renaissance and alchemy, reaching for something far more than the facility with bullshit which the large language models excel at. The manufacture of bullshit is the anti-Enlightenment. And yes, it’s also what the left hemisphere does in the schizoid condition. But the true master masters the truing of the self to the diverse breadth of visions and depths and heights of emotions, and speaks from that trued and truer — but never perfected, always striving — position with a Shakespearean range, abandoning the foolish consistencies which are the “hobgoblins of small minds.”
Of course, a great deal of the historical story of the Enlightenment depends on which exemplars one chooses to represent it. But the Romanticism of Goethe and friends was a branch of the Enlightened tree, not its contrary. (Truth is often tree-like — the words true and tree being from the same root.) Meanwhile large language models are massive heaps of gibberish, whose accidental likeness to meaning is like an ink blot’s.
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Nice piece. I’d missed it on first publication. One place this might be taken further: Here Iain writes of each hemisphere have its own mode of attention, but associates will with the “grasping” of the left hemisphere’s mode. Does the right hemisphere hold the potential for a different mode of willing? In many spiritual traditions, on leaving behind the left hemisphere’s grasping ego the spiritual “master” then retreats from the world, contributing at most some enigmatic poetry to us from her or his remote situation. With all respect to the essential value of retreat, our world is in an “all hands on deck” metacrisis at present. More wandering sadhus are, on balance, good, but not the level of heroism we need — even while ego-based heroics are themselves among our serious dangers. So: May there be ways to establish a right-hemisphere seat for or mode of willing? I don’t mean some surrender, in which we are to be possessed by some “great” spirit from beyond, but rather a will which is anchored thoroughly in the right hemisphere’s native modes of attention to our worlds, and our places in them?
On the self or no-self question which the essay mentions, I’ve just lately been wondering whether the better answer is fractal, rather than any binary declaration of self or no-self. I’ve long been fond of an old Chinese view, “No self in self.” The corollary of that would be “No other in self, either.” A danger of taking Iain’s books too literally, which I fell into a few times myself, is ending up where one not only seeks to identify with the right hemisphere, but to somehow sanction the presumed left hemisphere ego as an “other.” This splitting is, of course, not good. So my current view is it may be better to take the selves in self as fractal, varied, a whole best ordered resonantly, even as they take different parts in their chorus.
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Daniel,
With respect, McGilchrist is a psychiatrist. His books are an application of psychiatric, psychoanalytic and neuro-scientific theory to our current culture, including its politics. His central thesis is that there is a cultural contagion producing the same hyper-rational type of consciousness as typifies schizophrenics and those with right-hemisphere damage.
My concern that my brother is in total denial of the evidence of the rise in global temperatures resulting from industrial emissions is not a failure of empathy. Nor do I believe that the R.D. Laing approach to schizophrenic treatment — regarding those displaying the symptoms as being perhaps more in touch with reality than the rest of us — is the approach to be recommended here. McGilchrist certainly doesn’t recommend that.
If we are to study the fall of Rome, we must look at the Roman leadership, its politics. Given that McGilchrist sees our current civilization as close to a similar fall, we must look at our own leadership, our politics. One of the larger crises before world leadership is climate. That we have political factions throughout the Western world which rationalize that thousands of scientists, world-wide, are fabricating evidence of the climate threat in a well-coordinated conspiracy displays a serious psychological dysfunction. If McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis is correct, the wide reception of this conspiracy theory regarding science should be analyzable through it. The cure for this psychological dysfunction may be what’s required, if we’re to improve our cultures’ political responsiveness to the crisis, and save civilization from falling because of increasingly bad weather. If we’re to work towards a cure, we must squarely face the disease.
Do you lack all empathy for the hundreds of millions who will find their homelands uninhabitable within this century, if our actions fall short?
Whit
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Daniel,
Assigning people to “left” and “right,” politically, is largely nonsense — except to the degree those people self-identify as “left” or “right.” I’m essentially a Burkean conservative, descended from early New England and New Amsterdam immigrants, with an ethical stance easily recognized as a blend of Puritan and Dutch Reformed sensibilities.
That said, the Trumpists — including decidedly my brother — are something else, a radical break with the American traditions. I just spent a week with him working towards settling our father’s estate (Dad nearly made it to 99). We got along fine. But my brother’s beliefs combine (1) a total mistrust of the effects of modern corporate influence on our food supply, which he sees (somewhat accurately) as poisoning us in many ways, with (2) a total trust of corporate-sponsored denials regarding the reality of global warming. So in his mind our capitalist culture’s profit motive is a great threat to our individual bodies, but no significant threat to the climate of our our planetary body. That’s to say, he’s highly rationalistic, while at the same time plainly irrational.
As for the collusion of Trump and the Russians, have you read the Mueller Report? Or have you just trusted certain media’s assurance that there’s nothing to see? Whichever, not everyone who is against Trumpism is on the “left” — however you define it.
Regards,
Whit
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Charles,
I’ve also favored holism since childhood. Have you read much Carl Jung, on the male and female in each of us, and how becoming psychologically whole is to be achieved by the alchemical marriage of anima and animus? To deny that each of us is both feminine and masculine is to deny our shadows. What we exclude from consciousness becomes polarized in the unconscious. The persona (or “ego,” if we’re going with Strachey’s version of Freud’s term), is as Freud well-described in The Ego and The Id a left-hemisphere production — at least in regards to the gateway function of our public languages in our consciousness of our selves. The syntactical side of language, as McGilchrist presents, is LH, although the metaphors displayed in its more poetic use are RH.
My son, who at 18 is a straight male and physics major at an elite college, is home for the weekend, and has friends from his high school days staying over for their high school reunion. One is a boy born female, who is obviously male now, pursuing acting at a conservatory. One is a born female whose pronoun is “they.” Such usage is awkward for me, but “they” are brilliant, funny, and a talented artist. Our dinner guests tonight will include another kid, born male, who now presents as one of the most beautiful women.
These are all healthy, wonderful kids. Are we glad our son is one of the straight ones in his diverse friend group? Yes. There are many advantages in being normal in the larger society. Also, since my wife and I are entirely straight — neither tempted by seduction offers of various gay and bi friends over the years — it’s easier to understand him that it might be otherwise.
We might guess Jung, on viewing modern youth’s shifting enculturation regarding sex roles, would welcome it as progress. McGilchrist in several places appears to react differently to it. Jung told the BBC late in his career, “Thank God I am not a Jungian.” No psychological theory does well, when taken as doctrine.
Best,
Whit -
Helen,
My response was to what you posted here, not your article, which your advertisement for does not inspire me to read. By my reading of McGilchrist (yes I read every page, slowly, of both volumes and his prior opus), you miss his point. It’s not a war between an angelic hemisphere and a demonic one. Rather it’s the task of enfolding the LH’s rational and linguistic capacities into the context of the RH’s more holistic and aesthetic comprehension of our world and ourselves. This cannot be accomplished by somehow defeating rationality. It’s not a war of the hemispheres. If McGilchrist had defeated rationality he could never have written his wonderful books.
By the way, I don’t “hate” AI. I just see it as silly. There’s a real danger that people will be confused by it, mistaking it for something either conscious or intelligent, when all it’s doing is mashing phrases together. Seeing it as more than that is akin to seeing castles in the clouds … testimony to our own imaginative capability.
Best,
Whit -
I like this one: https://www.salon.com/2023/09/16/recent-evidence-suggests-prehistoric-women-were-hunters-too-said-they-werent/ — especially the detail that when graves have been discovered of men with weapons alongside the conclusion has been that they were hunters and warriors, when graves of women have been discovered with the same weapons beside them, the conclusion has been that someone thought it appropriate to put their husband’s weapons with them. We’re so damn blinded by our assumptions….
salon.com
Recent evidence suggests prehistoric women were hunters, too. Who said they weren't? Men, of course
Sex may not have determined prehistoric labor roles as once thought, which has stark implications for society today
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Are the differences between the two hemispheres (in typical people) also an instance of two cultures defining themselves against each other? Is, then, “what’s to be done” our finding ways to merge those cultures into a harmony, perhaps not so much a hierarchy of either as master over the other (like some fundamentalist man and wife), but two hands clasping, or clapping? Might the RH be more naturally egalitarian, the LH more naturally heirarchical, such that our society’s problem is not precisely that the RH should instead take the top position, but that the LH should loosen its claim and accept a more egalitarian composition of self?
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I was there in the 60s too, Charles. On average men and women are different. As individuals, there have always been women more like men than like average women, and men more like women than like average men. And there’s nothing superior about being average! Consider also the discussion in The Dawn of Everything about how neighboring cultures often define themselves against each other, with the Northwest coast Natives Americans being a slave-owning aristocratic culture, and the California coast Natives being strongly egalitarian, and each seeing the other’s norms as quite wrong. This is despite the two cultures being genetically quite close. It was nurture, not nature, being expressed. Well, men and women have also been, in many historical periods, neighboring cultures, defining themselves as being what the other is not. Much of the difference here — not all but not trivially — has been nurture, not nature.
In the 60s it was still common to speak of “the war of the sexes.” It was somewhat akin to the Cold War — also between two cultures defining themselves against each other. Of course, the Cold War is back now, as both Russia and China resort to defining themselves against the civilized world. And the war of the sexes has been revived by the US GOP, with its Supreme Court puppets revoking women’s freedoms.
In any case we don’t need a society which enforces differences in its institutions. People find plenty of ways to declare themselves different. The mods and the rockers in 60s London, disco and punk in 70s America, we always find ways to define ourselves by who we’re not. Yet the ultimate examples of mod and rocker, Bowie and Jagger, both when in their prime displayed a powerfully androgenous sexual charm.
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Charles,
Might I gently suggest that you hold a literalist’s adhesion to your own statements of belief. In this, you don’t get McGilchrist’s main point. For instance, your statements about your “realization” about “gangsters” as a kid. That’s a very simple parsing of reality, stripping your capacity to observe nuance. There is great difference between someone like Trump, who was close to Roy Cohn, the attorney for the top Mafia heads in NYC, and who even talks like a mobster about “rats” and in his promises of revenge, and has a long history of cheating people in business then threatening them, and someone like Biden, for whom there is no such evidence despite the smears from the Trumpist opposition.
As for on-site day care, thanks for advocating that. But being against equal rights — are you truly claiming women shouldn’t enjoy the same liberties as men? That’s not about being guaranteed equality of outcomes in life — which granted can never work — but about having equal opportunities. Day care increases opportunities. Are you saying that without on-site day care, women shouldn’t be allowed to work? Are you against freedom, in favor of feudalism?
Best,
Whit
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Hey Zachary, Glad you enjoyed The Dawn. On “equality,” they make the fascinating contrast between the Native Americans of what’s now California, and those of the what’s now the Northwest and British Columbia. The first were strongly egalitarian, the second hierarchical and slave holding. The first developed wonderful pottery and basket weaving traditions, the second the potlatch (conspicuously generous parties), and wonderfully crafted wooden boats and totem poles and more. These two adjacent cultures each defined themselves as being not what the other was. The Dawn presents this a recurrent theme of adjacent cultures. In the U.S. now we see something like this in the contrast between the relatively egalitarian ideals of New England and the Northeast, and the hierarchical neofascism ascendant in the former slave-holding states, and Florida and Texas adjacent to them.
In any case, The Dawn shows that there have been egalitarian societies as far back as there have been hierarchical ones — and that there is no one path of historical progress mandating that we go from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to pyramid builders to charioteers to … wherever our societies are today and tomorrow. A truer understanding of the human past shows the scope of possible human futures to be broad, and ours to determine through our vast creative capabilities.
We’ve far too limited a grasp of the grandness of the prospects of human cultures. And, as Iain shows, we’ve far too limited a grasp of the grandness of ourselves. We’ve reduced ourselves to cogs in a machine-like rationalized reality. We need to recover our dreaming, and bring forth a more beautiful, resonant human world from those dreams.
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Mike,
Much appreciate your engagement, both here and with this whole mess of ideas. Somewhat randomly, I just read Nathaniel Barrett’s article, “Facing Up to the Problem of Affect,” in last year’s Nov.-Dec. Journal of Consciousness Studies. He doesn’t touch on narrative, but emphasizes how affect has been nearly totally ignored in theories of consciousness, especially those focused on “information.” This reminds me of a study from around 1970, where those with left-hemisphere damage that limited verbal comprehension were far better, in watching a video, at knowing whether a speaker was lying. (Sorry I totally lack the reference for that.) If what we say is LH, the spirit in which we say it may be RH.
In your spectrum of narrative types, from the most explicit to the most subtle (if I’m reading that roughly right), what’s the place or relationship of affect? I suspect that Barrett’s narrower case, against discounting of the possibility that affect is a core value of consciousness rather than a peripheral concern, may be true more broadly when narrative is taken as primarily as the information content of symbolic strings, ignoring the melodies and harmonies of those strings’ vibrations.
To quote Ed Sander’s favorite Plato line, “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.” Much of what McGilchrist objects to for instance in the drift of tone in scientific articles looks much like the flattening of affect in psychiatric cases, perhaps.
Hope all’s well with those family obligations.
Whit