(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)
McGilchrist suggests that the two hemispheres of our brain tend to perceive the world differently. The left hemisphere tends to have a narrow beam, a tight focus on a specific area. The right hemisphere tends to have a broad awareness of everything that is going on. McGilchrist applies this insight to cultural analysis, suggesting that modern society has a left hemisphere imbalance.
I think he’s right, and that we see that in the problem I call monofocus. Instead of thinking about the everything/everyone in a system, we focus on one particular thing/person in the system. How and why we select that thing/person is not always clear. But we then demand that we optimise the outcome for this particular thing/person, regardless of how it impacts others. Later on the focus may swing to another thing/person, and a new call goes out for optimising the outcome for this thing/person. And no one seems to notice that the problems this second thing/person has were in part caused by our attempting to optimise outcomes for the first thing/person. And no one seems to ask how our new optimisation attempt will impact thing person one or three.
For example, when my wife was teaching, an Ed Psych report came back saying a particular child needed to be able to blow a whistle loudly in class whenever they felt like it. I’m not qualified to say whether that was the most helpful intervention for the individual child. I can say that the outcome for the class of the child being able to blow a loud whistle whenever they felt like it would be extremely negative for peaceful environment and learning outcomes. The report had a monofocus on the individual child, and no awareness of the needs of the whole class.
Or take the covid response. Over the year before Covid-19 hit, there were high profile public campaigns about the problems of loneliness for mental health and about single use plastics for the environment. But when Covid-19 hit, these previous concerns were simply ignored. The narrow beam of focus had moved to a new problem, and so optimising for defeating Covid made the risks of loneliness (lockdown) and single use plastics (masks and tests) irrelevant. In general, I suggest our response to Covid showed a monofocus, rather than a broader weighing up of costs and benefits.
What is the alternative? Ideally, if both hemisphere’s are in balance, we would consider each individual in the group, and how the group as a whole is functioning. We’d consider each issue with awareness of all the other issues. We might not optimise the outcome for every individual thing/person, but we would hopefully have overall better outcomes when considering the range of people and issues, and a more stable approach rather than swinging our whole approach with each shift in focus. The narrow focus would still be needed to spot problems and suggest improvements, but within an awareness of trade-offs.
What do you think? Is monofocus a helpful way of thinking about our society? And how could we rebalance our thinking?
Jots and Scribbles 