(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)
In his book the Master and the Emissary, Iain McGilchrist sets out to show how the two separated hemispheres of the cortex process the world differently.
The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the left world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, or is imperfectly known—and to this world that exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system.
(Left hemisphere dominance/ right hemisphere weakness are implicated in schizophrenia (lack of context) and autism (struggle with implicit and emotional).)
McGilchrist is concerned that the modern world has been shaped by a left hemisphere bias that is blind to its own bias. Both our thought patterns (enlightenment onwards especially) and our industrial and bureaucratic economy are expressions of and reinforcements of the left hemisphere way of operating. The left hemisphere prefers the mechanical and the explicit, and the models it has made rather than messy reality.
The left hemisphere is competitive, and its concern, its primary motivation, is power…
It would be relatively mechanical, an assemblage of more or less disconnected parts; It would be relatively abstract and disembodied; Relatively distant from fellow feeling; Given to explicitness; Utilitarian ethic; overconfident of its own take on reality, and lacking insight into its own problems—the neuropsychological evidence is that these are all aspects of the left hemisphere world as compared with the right.
For me at least, there is something that rings true as McGilchrist speaks about what a world dominated by the left hemisphere would be like. This is how McGilcrhist summarises the findings on a left brain dominated world: An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualized world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, have come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.
And elsewhere:
the left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation. Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, my blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary western life.
It’s worth highlighting here that the left hemisphere is not bad. Its approach yields massive benefits of analysis and power to manipulate the world that literally builds civilization and enables conversation. But the left hemisphere approach can block out the necessity for right hemisphere insights and approaches, because the left hemisphere controls language (so it wins arguments) and creates systems that seem complete and so leave no space for right hemisphere insights.
I think there is something that rings true here both for our society in the UK, and in certain ways for evangelicals in the UK. So I plan to dig into a few places I see this sort of imbalance, and how we might learn to be more balanced.
Jots and Scribbles 
I’m suspicious of Dunbar’s diagnosis here for a couple of reasons
Some of his symptoms sound like the sort of thing a conman tries to sell you on – you know, the stuff that sounds really specific, but is actually near universal e.g. “overconfident of its own take on reality, and lacking insight into its own problems” is something you can say about everything other than Plato’s Socrates and rationalists (and even then their opponents still say it). Similarly “unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia” is a diagnosis you can give to anything which makes predictions it cares about and isn’t literally perfect.
The features he highlights don’t fit a tight scheme. Have they really been predicted by his model, or did he observe the world, record what he saw, and then pretend the observations actually arose from his system? E.g. “the left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation.” Autistics are highly sensitive to discrepancies, which sounds right brained in the description above, but earlier in the article we established people with autism were left brain dominant.
Overall I find this diagnosis of modernism’s neurosis less compelling than Seeing like a State (the state demands things be run in a highly bureaucratic way because that’s the way it can control and tax), or Murray/Holland’s (the modern world has a Christian ethic shorn of Christian belief. This still works in some ways, but the belief was a load bearing element of the structure, and like any body minus its skeleton it flops about a lot doing damage).
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Fair enough. One of the problem with summaries is you don’t get the cumulative weight of page after page of studies building a picture of the differences. But there is a risk McGilchrist is imposing a pattern on the evidence. McGilchrist says that the hemisphere differences he describes group together things and approaches in ways that don’t neatly match on to any pre-existing philosophies.
I don’t think that the divided brain hypothesis competes with Seeing like a State- it could be that industrialisation and bureaucratisation are as much causes of left brain bias as caused by left brain approaches. But the left brain bias gets entrenched by the industrial and bureaucratic world shaping the environment.
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