[zachary baker]

I have read about half of “the dawn of everything”, prompted by our interesting exchange of ideas of earlier on this summer. Thank you, whoever suggested it! From his vacuous comment I suspect Chomsky didn’t bother, frankly.

It is an odd but worthwhile read, although I am longing to get back to “the matter with things”. But for quality of thinking and turn pf phrase. Nobody constructs paragraphs like Iain anymore. I tend to read fiction alongside non-fiction but fold smaller non-fiction works into larger ones. anyway. The main take away so far for me, which has caused some controversy in casual discussion at garden parties this summer is that “the origin of inequality” as a research question leads inevitably to a sense that the concept of “equality” itself is just inadequate to express the complexity of human difference and thus tends to reduce political debate to platitudes and sophistry. This is perhaps more my own interpretation of what “the dawn of everything” intimates than what graeber and pal actually are saying. It has got me into some considerable trouble in woke south london. The notion that equality is a concept unfit for purpose when applied to humanity is regarded as decidedly uncouth. My more robust (too technical for the garden party) defense is based on the fact that equality models primarily a mathematical relationship, as opposed to a relationship between individual life forms. Where the relata are fundamentally unquantifiable (people), equality, or lack there of, is irrelevant. You cannot balance the equation between me and him, let alone them and them, or him and her. People make for unbalancebale equations. Obviously we can talk about sovereignty and equality before the law or the king, of whatever. These days though, there is no recourse to any embodiment of sovereignty at all, so i am inclined to think it is also not relevant.

Beyond this, they also suggest, very interestingly, that the idea of an agricultural revolution is bullshit. They point to much evidenc suggesting that great civilisations even rejected the enclosure of land, in order to protect crops as grain was not worth the hassle. I love this and think they are probably right. ALso, tyhey totally trash Yuval Noah Harare for being the superficial, anthumanist dickwad that he clearly is, which I also appreciated.

All the best, z

[zachary baker]

<div>apologies for my totally irrelevant reply to comment in this discussion
feed. I am new to the channel and also online discussion. Having been
reading McGilchrist since against criticism in around 2001, i was
surprised at you suspicion of his potential crypto Nazism. Also, and
surely this is the same q, his extolling of the catholic church and zen
Buddhism being a source of suspicion. On the one hand, as a seeker for
answers to the big questions like yourself, and coming from a long
standing commitment to holistic thought as opposed to reductive, sharing
your wholehearted rejection of mechanical materialism, such an
endorsement of organised religious enterprises that are little short of
balls out cultural colonisers, i too find hard to swallow. Context
though, suggests that this extolling is is partial, the endorsement
being of the ritual, spiritual, archetypal, unmeasurable qualities of
experience that can be championed through these belief systems as
opposed to an apology for any of their associated with Nazism or
Japanese militarism. Imo, he sometimes gestures in one direction in
order to make aparticular point emerge and stick while consciously
ignoring other implications that could arise should the gesture be taken
as a declaration rather than the modelling of a position within the
context of, for example, which aspects of human experience do we need to
recover following such a protracted period of LH predominance in our
culture.
</div><div>

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[zachary baker]

Thanks for your very interesting personal history of prediction through intuition. To what extent do you feel that this “power” (small p) is a form of pattern recognition undertaken subconsciously, perhaps even simultaneously with the rise of the question, in the RH? I find I have made my most obviously successful predictions in the least effortful way, as if the first occurrence of an idea is the trustworthy one. Oddly this seems to be true across utterly diverse areas in my life. For example, as a musician, very often the best drum part for new composition turns out to be an extrapolation of what i played in the very first approach to an idea, often the very first time it arose, with no effort at all, just a kind of nonchalant acceptance of what i was playing, more as if the music was expressing me, emerging through me. This may be explained by the idea of a shared flow state consciousness but it always comes as a kind of magical state of grace, and has it’s own socio-spiritual context. Often the process that follows is much less effortless and over months and years as relationships stabilise the state of grace becomes rarer. Nonetheless, there have been many repetitions over my nearly 40 years of improvising composition with other musicians and I remain hopefully in anticipation of the next moment.

Alternatively, at the very beginning of a football (soccer) tournament a few years ago, as someone who is a level 1 of 10 expert – i really don’t follow much sport at all – i was convinced that the final would be between Italy and England and that it would be very closely fought, there would be foul play from Italy and England would eventually succumb. If only I’d put money on it as this is precisely what happened 2 weeks later. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that I had no business making such a prediction, i hardly even new the names of the players, but I was naiively sure of the way things would pan out and i think there must have been unconscious RH pattern recognition stuff going that for once was not forced to show it’s work and so came out pure and clear.