FINISHED READING - The Master & His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist started off wondering about the physical nature of our brains. Split, as they are, into two hemispheres with an inbulit asymmetry. This surely could not be an inconsiquential fluke of human evolution, there had to be a purpose in this. He began researching how this brain structure informs our functioning and world view. Many of our psychological struggles often hinging upon a sense of self as divided, a mental tug of war between competing hemispherical inclinations.

The divergent functioning of left and right hemispheres, is more complex and nuanced than pop psychology presents it - as left side nerdy and right side creative. Broadly speaking the two hemispheres hold different overall views and purpose, that at their best co-produce a third way forward. In this process there is cross referencing and interplay. 

The left hemisphere deals with facts and known things, with categorising, synthesising perceptions, feelings and the knowledge it receives. The right hemisphere meets and greets the world in a less pre-processed, pre-packaged way. It is, of necessity, open and receptive to new experiences and sensory information. Responding to intuitions or perceptions that perhaps lie on the fringes of the known, and even to what lies beyond it. The left posseses a narrow minded certainty, whilst the right holds a broader receptivity, a more flexible perspective and range of responses. The right meets life as it appears, the left as it has already been known.

Having come to his hypothesis of hemispherical world views as so diometrically opposite, McGilchrist observed that their interactions has a history of getting out of balance. Though usually any lurch towards the left is counter balanced by a subsequent lurch in bias towards the right. Today the left hemisphere appears to have become dominant, resulting in the denigration of anything from the right hemisphere that does not fall within its stringent rationalising criteria. 

The left hemisphere demands suggestive intuitions be made logical and explicit, or face exclusion. The right hemisphere is meant to act as a necessary check on the insensitivity and inflexibilty of the left hemisphere's authoritarian tendencies. A rigidity that encourages human beings to think of their own mind and body, as though they were a malfunctioning machine. And we wonder why we can become so alienated.

The Master and his Emissary is divided into two parts. The first part an exhaustive ( and exhausting! ) technically focused justification for his hemispherical hypothesis. To the lay reader, such as myself, that thoroughness proved testing. I do not see myself as a philosopher, or an expert in neurology. So I found myself floundering at times. Its a challenging read. Trying to comprehend what minute neurological or philosophical distinction about the hemispheres he was trying to make. 

In terms of my comprehension I acknowledge I have my limits. I tend towards being a ' just give me the general gist' type of person, not that great with minutiae or technical detail or abstruse language. But I'm also not one to be easily defeated either. I could tell it was cogently written, found a lot of it exciting to engage with, and consequently stuck with it. His musings on the musical origins of language and its relationship to right handedness, is one that particularly stood out for me. 

Some things to note about McGilchrist's writing style, is he draws on an impressively wide range of sources, both literary, historical, philosophical, psychological and scientific. He frequently goes off on digressions. These maybe interesting, but they are digressions nonetheless, which though often captivating, do often muddy the direction of the discourse. I ended up wishing he could be more concise as a writer.  

The emphasis changes in the second section, into investigating the influence of left and right brain hemispheres throughout human culture and history. If Part One struck me as quite left hemisphere, Part Two was decidedly more right hemisphere. Even at times resembling a freed animal let loose to excitedly ramble over a wide range of topics and territories. 

Even if you are a tad unconvinced by Mc Gilchrist's theory, there are provocative ideas a plenty here to prompt the question - then why might this be so? Why did our way of writing and reading reverse direction? Why did self portraits over centuries reverse the way they face from right to left, and the point of emanation of light source change direction accordingly? 

He proceeds through history examining Ancient to Classical civilisations. When he reaches The Renaissance, he makes his most convincing case for the flowering of the right hemisphere re-emergence, with the rediscovery of classical worlds, of perspective, the emergence of individuality, the cult of melancholic longing. 

Most of which gets trashed by the fundamentalist fervor of The Reformation that followed. McGilchrist paints a pityful picture of Luther, the catalyst of it all, ending up a truly disillusioned man. He simply wished for the Catholic Church he loved, to behave more ethically and authentically. In which he saw a meaningful role for rich imagery and metaphor in religious life. Yet his actions in challenging the Church, instead let loose a wave of puritanical iconoclasm. Stripping the altars of imagery, metaphorical or otherwise, of anything that they deemed inauthentic. It is in The Reformation one first sees how left hemisphere, literalistic rationales when allowed free rein, are ruthless in purging the world of anything unable to conform to it. Our lives being consequently impoverished.

If The Reformation was a shift towards religious literalism, what followed,The Enlightenment, was its secular twin. Religious supremacy sliding seamlessly into scientific supremacy. The infallibility of God substituted by the infallibility of Scientific Materialism. The emergence of Romanticism, presenting a right hemisphere counter cultural response to the sweeping left hemisphere revolutions that preceded it. 

This is then followed by the Industrial Revolution and the infallibility of economic progress. During which we have the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris  Arts & Crafts and Aesthetic movements the sentimental last surge of Renaissance and Romantic impulses. Trying to regain something from the blood bath of the imagination that the left hemisphere has engaged in.

It's not until the 20th century era of Modernism you begin to cogently recognise, and feel familiar with, the world he is describing. An all pervasive and developing alienation of Self from Other. The increased incidence of the sense of self being divorced or distanced from the body it inhabits. Manifesting in increased problems with being, mental and otherwise, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, autism, anorexia, gender dysphoria, in Western 'developed' societies. Peoples well being prefaced by dislocation from a sense of place, identity and community that mass urban industrialisation required. All of this McGilchrist places at the feet of an out of control left hemisphere view of the world.

His final flurry is through the Modernist and Post Modern world of art, is used as an instructive parallel. Born of world wars, revolutions and the nuclear age, it radically and continually overturns the stability of tradition and cultural conventions. He confronts the dissonant cold hearted rationalism of it all, and makes a plea to see this for what it is, that this sort of constant upheaval destabilises a society's culture and ourselves. And we see the replacement of art with novelty, originality with something that is merely new, looking and feeling become the impassive analytical gaze, art that is solely about surface painterly effects, innovation adopting the form of constantly tearing up expectations and taboos. The beautiful soul of art being hollowed out.

With Post Modernism art adopts self reflexive naval gazing. Art becomes a game, one that has a code, that requires a decoder, interpretation by those in the know. You can't just look, enter in and understand, you have to research, interrogate and take the art apart, as though this art were an strange machine arrived from outer space. All of these things mirror the divorce from overt feeling that encapsulates the left hemisphere aesthetic.

Whether or not his hypothesis turns out to be true, as a metaphor it tells you a huge amount about why we are, where we are, in modern life. There is always a danger when you start exploring the nature of our split hemisphered brain, that the two sides become caricatures that turn the left hemisphere into - the dangerous gremlin and the right hemisphere into - the much abused angel. The pattern he describes of our culture shifting from one sided bias to another, may also be in response to context. In times of upheaval we tend to look for and cling to certainties, we wish the world to be more stable and literal. And then from stability we allow ourselves to dream more, it becomes more about improving the texture and quality of our existence. 

I came across McGilchrist via the many interviews and forums he's appeared on social media. He attracts a wide range of people who appreciate his ideas, its noticeable that he is most enthusiastically taken up, for their own purposes,by many conservative and right wing groups. His criticisms of Modernism and Post Modernism seeming to chime with their own view that society is broken because its failed to defend its culture and uphold traditions. Whilst McGilchrist is a quietly spoken man, with a nimble mind. He is a very skilled communicator and can quite subtly shift the emphasis when someone asks him a stupid question. He appears at pains to emphasise the provisional nature of his hypothesis. This is certainly a book that is an important corrective to the pernicious drift of our culture into intolerance and bogus certainty.

'In this book certainty has not been my aim. I am not so much worried by the aspects that remain unclear, as by those which appear to be clarified, since that almost certainly means a failure to see clearly.....It is the striving that enables us to achieve better understanding, but only as long as it is imbued with a tactful recognition of the limits to human understanding, The rest is hubris.'

Iain McGilchrist, taken from The Master & His Emissary
Published by Yale University Press, 2020. 

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8