The Master and his Emissary

This is the title of a remarkable book by Ian McGilchrist that I am reading at present. Even before I finish it I can't recommend it too strongly to anyone who is interested in our behaviour and our culture. In essence, it explains the asymmetry in our brains and how this not only affects us individually, but also how it has guided the history of human development. The author is a neuropsychologist who also happens to have taught English at Oxford University. So his thoughts are based on extensive scientific research into how our brains function. But his achievement is to fill the gap that exists between recent understanding of how this amazing organ operates and ways of thinking both now and in our past about the different sides of our nature, sometimes referred to as the rational and the romantic. He makes extensive reference to philosophers' grappling attempts to understand our make-up and motivations. Nietzsche, and others after him, referred to the two sides of human nature as the Apollonian and Dionysian.

The first part of the book explains how the two hemispheres operate. In essence the right brain initially perceives the bigger picture, seeing things in context and in relation to one another. The left brain then takes over and examines them in detail -- it is able to de-contexturalise and to abstract. Finally it hands this analysis back to the right brain to put it into the larger context again for action. There have been attempts by protagonists for both sides of our nature to promote their side of the brain as being much more important, but the point is that we have only come this far because both have worked in tandem. McGilchrist's argument is that now we have lost that balance. The left brain is not handing things back, and we are no longer seeing the bigger picture of our place in nature, only that of narrow self interest. Reason makes its own self-perpetuating rules. He sees this case of the Emissary (left brain) taking over from the Master (united brain) is much of the cause of our current problems of over-exploitation of the planet and of one another.

I find this really exciting because it covers so much similar ground to my lectures and thinking: loss of empathy for other humans and for the environment, embodied (craft) knowledge, and keeping a balance between our rational and our spiritual/nature knowledge. But it explains all this, not as some vague split between reason and romance, but inescapably in terms of what is going on in our own brains. And knowing that, maybe we can wrest control back from our left brains and put things 'right' again!

I will put up another post when I have finished the book, but it won't be for a while until after we have done the Milan show.