Art is how you fire up the right hemisphere. Art, visual, literary, sculptural, architectural. Quit letting the MBA Bro types decide everything based on profit optimization. They're the ones who've turned our houses into ticky-tacky huts, made our clothing dead and uninteresting, turned our public buildings into eyesores, and made all the products we use into the cheapest and ugliest things possible.
America is particularly cursed from the architectural and artistic perspective. An amazing country in so many ways: naturally beautiful, populated by strong and religious people - but the predominating newbuild box architecture is such a blight in so many places. It feels cheap and artificial in a way that the historic parts of Europe do not. I think this has to have spiritual consequences for those who dwell within it.
I've lived in different parts of the United States at stages of my life and I have to say American architecture post WWII is just garbage. Prior to that, hand tools were the norm, joinery was necessary, and houses were prettier. It was the post WWII housing boom that saw homes turned to dogshit...one of the secret weapons of WWII was a collection of electrically powered hand tools being developed and used en masse. They'd been around before, but WubbleYa TWO saw a whole suite of carpenter's power tools developed and put into use for speedy construction. Add to this the use of plywood and balloon framing of houses reached new lows in ugly while reaching new highs in profitability.
There are a couple of reasons European architecture is more fully integrated and attractive:
(1) the materials used in their construction were, historically, by and large, locally obtained. This meant they looked like they belonged to the environment from which the materials were extracted. This was the practice in the US before steam locomotives and later trucking made moving massive quantities of materials for construction cheap enough to alter the very components of construction.
and,
(2), Europeans have a higher expectation of quality derived from the historically greater need to optimize materials use. By this, I mean to say that a house in Europe HAS to be better built than one in a place with vastly larger quantities of cheap materials with which to build. The need to optimize stems from living 'closer to the bone' economically. It is much more efficient in the long term to build a better-quality house that will last 70-125 years or more than build a cheap one that has to be replaced in 50 years. And some forms of European architecture last for centuries.
In short, cheap materials and fast construction techniques make American ticky-tacky huts what they are. There's an implicit expectation they'll be bulldozed in 50 years and replaced with something new. It's a terribly short-sighted and inefficient strategy.
Same in UK. The 5 big building companies, ( forgetting the shareholder / executive spaffing of the carillion episode ) - unfortunately have had, & continue 2 hav --- a mutual ball lock symbiotic holding agreement with successive UK govts for decades now.
It really is a materials technology & aesthetic 💰h!t🐍how.
I can kind of get some of these hypothesi you are discussing in convo here, however, I would personally disagree with others. It seems pychologically simplistic and reductive in places to me, personally, in my opinion - which I would not discuss further on this social platform.
I do though, think that you are doing a good job of presenting these topical and contemporarily relevant, fields of thought, and opening them up to the general populace to discuss the nuances within them.
Without genuine & thought provoking debate, this planet is pretty much full of dead meat.
The recent tilt toward the left hemisphere in the West likely has a lot to do parenting practices ... shortly after the printing press was introduced, parenting books advocating stuff like "don't hug / coddle your kids" and "babies should sleep alone" and "it's good to physically punish your children" (etc etc) starting appearing. Alice Miller traced the history in her book "For Your Own Good" and argued that these books -- which mostly came out of the former Holy Roman Empire and modern-day Germany -- were responsible for generations of German children growing up without loving contact from family, and this lead to higher rates of narcissism and a vulnerability to authoritarianism among them, which set the conditions for Nazi Germany. I have a handful of essay discussing this on my Substack.
Edit: Sorry, this is because the RH is dominant and rapidly developing in the first three years of life, and any disruption of brain development then will disproportionately affect the RH, leading to the traits you guys discuss here. Early attachment issues, but also stuff like being fed formula instead of breastmilk etc.
As well, many of the observations McGilchrist made -- including those about why the hemispheres would have evolved out of divided attention (being both a predator and prey animal, with the LH being more the "predator" and the RH more the "prey") -- were actually made a decade earlier by Dr. Leonard Shlain. McGilchrist was aware of Shlain's book, but didn't reference it. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's because there were a ton of problems with Shlain's book and theories. For one, Shlain argued that the left hemisphere was "masculine" and the right hemisphere "feminine", which is just obviously incorrect.
I wrote a long piece spinning off both Shlain and McGilchrist, arguing that the left hemisphere is more "androgynous" -- and more inclined toward misogyny and misandry, while at the same time being "anti-sexist" -- while sex differences somewhat lateralize to the right hemisphere.
Yes -- and the contemporary use of parenting "scripts" from books, influencers etc as well. If you speak to your kids like a bad actor in an infomercial, it shouldn't be surprising when they end up having difficulty with non-verbal communication cues.
Very well put! Bad actor in an informercial!!! Seen that so many times 😱 but often I have thought prob the parent is really tired, bored, strung out, and is stuck between going completely batty with stress or merely attempting to vocalise simple syllables while still breathing & enunciating constants and the odd vowel. 😏
It’s interesting that John Carter associates the left-brain with the political Left (and I would think of the idea of the political Left as having a correspondence with the symbolic Left, which is why the whole how-they-were-seated-at-the-French-Revolution thing actually stuck… it wasn’t arbitrary, it mapped the political to the symbolic).
To me it seems that the opposite is the case - the left brain is the Right. The left brain controls the right side of the body, so the left brain is the right hand and all the symbolism that goes along with that, and the right brain, which controls the left hand, is the left hand and the symbolism that goes along with that. To explain it another way, before we had the means to understand the functioning of the hemispheres, what we now know to be the expressions of the left brain were associated with the actions of the right side of the body. You shake with the right hand, you wipe yourself with the left. The right hand is clean, the left hand is unclean. The right is the known, the left is the stranger. The right is the center, the left reaches out to the margin (sit at my right hand, the disciples not knowing what they ask when they want to sit one on the right and one on the left of Christ, etc.).
Furthermore, autism is like a hyper-male and hyper-left-brained disorder (and the Masculine of course corresponds to the symbolic and political Right).
The success of the Left in the Long March was one that required a right-brained awareness of illegible power structures (how things actually work). The Right was trying to deal with how things were supposed to work according to the left-brained “rules”.
I risk trying to systematize the right-brained symbolic via a left-brained approach… but I do think something key is missed if you try to associate the left-brained with the political and symbolic Left (though there are certainly many on the Left who exhibit left-brained pathology).
I don't think the hemispheres map as easily onto political orientation as suggested here. It would be somewhat true today, because the left is so extreme, but I think it's a bit more accurate to say that extremism, narcissism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy are associated with left hemisphere-thinking.
You and your guest, John Carter gave a brilliant distillation of the work of Ian McGilchrist regarding the different functions of the right and left hemisphere of the brain. It was a sheer pleasure to listen to you both discuss the implications of this duel modality of consciousness, whether in our own lives or in its effect on civilization writ large.
I agree with John Carter’s supposition that the left hews towards a left brain character and the right towards a right hemisphere expression. I want to add to this idea, lest anyone miss it, that this is a temporal manifestation.
I was formerly and originally aligned with the political left. I can tell you that as an American on the left during the George W. Bush years, had I known this concept then, I could easily have made the reverse case. Today we can state that the right is (or was) passive to the left’s manic activism. A generation ago, the left quietly said amongst its members, that we don’t know how to be in power, but only stand outside the gates of power and make noises of opposition. Today the right creates hilarious memes that capture reality with simplicity, whereas the left creates The Wall of Text. Yesterday, the left ruled comedy. For most of the 2000s, the left were the playful ones with a sense of the absurd (right brained), while the right were often rigidly rule-based. Today the situation is reversed. The left once stood aghast as the right made war, vaingloriously imposing their will and self-image on distant regions (left brained). Today it is the left that carries out this same horrific folly.
You could argue that the Bush administration does not represent your values. I could argue that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton with their “third way” neoliberalism in no way represented the values of the traditional left.
My point is that left/right brain hemisphere does not code cleanly to left/right politics. As the right is ascendant politically in Western countries, it would serve us (on the right) well to remember not to be complacent, because these things can flip.
I thought John Carter gave a beautiful example of a right to left hemisphere migration in how science has changed. As he said, the first desire of those men long ago was to know the mind of God. Now look at the state of science! We have the replication crisis, hyper specialization and devout “scientism” that must not be questioned.
I think the master and his emissary at a civilizational level can be compared to the principal-agent problem. Fantastic ideas drift through the generations and become desiccated in their implementation.
The way I see it, we in the West have inherited certain notions from the Enlightenment that have finally deposited us on a barren, rocky shore. Among those notions, we hold rationality at the pinnacle of human intelligence. By doing so, we have become estranged from the creative spark that inspires. That spark contains rationality, but goes beyond it. It’s rather like mistaking our knowledge of science as a greater thing than creation and the cosmos itself.
We have within each one of us the emissary. Ian McGilchrist posits that we live in a left brain world. As such, perhaps it is easier for us to be more directly acquainted with the emissary. We can teach our emissary that it has real value as a servant, but that as a servant its value is only realized when its labours are offered back to the master. This is how the cycle is meant to be refreshed and perpetuated.
Art is how you fire up the right hemisphere. Art, visual, literary, sculptural, architectural. Quit letting the MBA Bro types decide everything based on profit optimization. They're the ones who've turned our houses into ticky-tacky huts, made our clothing dead and uninteresting, turned our public buildings into eyesores, and made all the products we use into the cheapest and ugliest things possible.
Yes. Music too.
I knew I was missing something important in that list.
America is particularly cursed from the architectural and artistic perspective. An amazing country in so many ways: naturally beautiful, populated by strong and religious people - but the predominating newbuild box architecture is such a blight in so many places. It feels cheap and artificial in a way that the historic parts of Europe do not. I think this has to have spiritual consequences for those who dwell within it.
It has massive spiritual consequences. All of them terrible.
I've lived in different parts of the United States at stages of my life and I have to say American architecture post WWII is just garbage. Prior to that, hand tools were the norm, joinery was necessary, and houses were prettier. It was the post WWII housing boom that saw homes turned to dogshit...one of the secret weapons of WWII was a collection of electrically powered hand tools being developed and used en masse. They'd been around before, but WubbleYa TWO saw a whole suite of carpenter's power tools developed and put into use for speedy construction. Add to this the use of plywood and balloon framing of houses reached new lows in ugly while reaching new highs in profitability.
There are a couple of reasons European architecture is more fully integrated and attractive:
(1) the materials used in their construction were, historically, by and large, locally obtained. This meant they looked like they belonged to the environment from which the materials were extracted. This was the practice in the US before steam locomotives and later trucking made moving massive quantities of materials for construction cheap enough to alter the very components of construction.
and,
(2), Europeans have a higher expectation of quality derived from the historically greater need to optimize materials use. By this, I mean to say that a house in Europe HAS to be better built than one in a place with vastly larger quantities of cheap materials with which to build. The need to optimize stems from living 'closer to the bone' economically. It is much more efficient in the long term to build a better-quality house that will last 70-125 years or more than build a cheap one that has to be replaced in 50 years. And some forms of European architecture last for centuries.
In short, cheap materials and fast construction techniques make American ticky-tacky huts what they are. There's an implicit expectation they'll be bulldozed in 50 years and replaced with something new. It's a terribly short-sighted and inefficient strategy.
Absolutely 💯
Same in UK. The 5 big building companies, ( forgetting the shareholder / executive spaffing of the carillion episode ) - unfortunately have had, & continue 2 hav --- a mutual ball lock symbiotic holding agreement with successive UK govts for decades now.
It really is a materials technology & aesthetic 💰h!t🐍how.
🚽
I can kind of get some of these hypothesi you are discussing in convo here, however, I would personally disagree with others. It seems pychologically simplistic and reductive in places to me, personally, in my opinion - which I would not discuss further on this social platform.
I do though, think that you are doing a good job of presenting these topical and contemporarily relevant, fields of thought, and opening them up to the general populace to discuss the nuances within them.
Without genuine & thought provoking debate, this planet is pretty much full of dead meat.
👍
Thanks Nancy. I wouldn’t take us too seriously, mostly trying to have a fun and interesting conversation
Great talk from two of my favorite substack writers.
The recent tilt toward the left hemisphere in the West likely has a lot to do parenting practices ... shortly after the printing press was introduced, parenting books advocating stuff like "don't hug / coddle your kids" and "babies should sleep alone" and "it's good to physically punish your children" (etc etc) starting appearing. Alice Miller traced the history in her book "For Your Own Good" and argued that these books -- which mostly came out of the former Holy Roman Empire and modern-day Germany -- were responsible for generations of German children growing up without loving contact from family, and this lead to higher rates of narcissism and a vulnerability to authoritarianism among them, which set the conditions for Nazi Germany. I have a handful of essay discussing this on my Substack.
Edit: Sorry, this is because the RH is dominant and rapidly developing in the first three years of life, and any disruption of brain development then will disproportionately affect the RH, leading to the traits you guys discuss here. Early attachment issues, but also stuff like being fed formula instead of breastmilk etc.
As well, many of the observations McGilchrist made -- including those about why the hemispheres would have evolved out of divided attention (being both a predator and prey animal, with the LH being more the "predator" and the RH more the "prey") -- were actually made a decade earlier by Dr. Leonard Shlain. McGilchrist was aware of Shlain's book, but didn't reference it. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's because there were a ton of problems with Shlain's book and theories. For one, Shlain argued that the left hemisphere was "masculine" and the right hemisphere "feminine", which is just obviously incorrect.
I wrote a long piece spinning off both Shlain and McGilchrist, arguing that the left hemisphere is more "androgynous" -- and more inclined toward misogyny and misandry, while at the same time being "anti-sexist" -- while sex differences somewhat lateralize to the right hemisphere.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-androgynous-mind
Thanks for that. I'd never heard of Shlain. As you say, correlating to sexual differences is nonsensical.
Definitely agreed that parenting practices have a huge impact. The trend towards helicopter parenting is also huge.
Yes -- and the contemporary use of parenting "scripts" from books, influencers etc as well. If you speak to your kids like a bad actor in an infomercial, it shouldn't be surprising when they end up having difficulty with non-verbal communication cues.
Very well put! Bad actor in an informercial!!! Seen that so many times 😱 but often I have thought prob the parent is really tired, bored, strung out, and is stuck between going completely batty with stress or merely attempting to vocalise simple syllables while still breathing & enunciating constants and the odd vowel. 😏
It’s interesting that John Carter associates the left-brain with the political Left (and I would think of the idea of the political Left as having a correspondence with the symbolic Left, which is why the whole how-they-were-seated-at-the-French-Revolution thing actually stuck… it wasn’t arbitrary, it mapped the political to the symbolic).
To me it seems that the opposite is the case - the left brain is the Right. The left brain controls the right side of the body, so the left brain is the right hand and all the symbolism that goes along with that, and the right brain, which controls the left hand, is the left hand and the symbolism that goes along with that. To explain it another way, before we had the means to understand the functioning of the hemispheres, what we now know to be the expressions of the left brain were associated with the actions of the right side of the body. You shake with the right hand, you wipe yourself with the left. The right hand is clean, the left hand is unclean. The right is the known, the left is the stranger. The right is the center, the left reaches out to the margin (sit at my right hand, the disciples not knowing what they ask when they want to sit one on the right and one on the left of Christ, etc.).
Furthermore, autism is like a hyper-male and hyper-left-brained disorder (and the Masculine of course corresponds to the symbolic and political Right).
The success of the Left in the Long March was one that required a right-brained awareness of illegible power structures (how things actually work). The Right was trying to deal with how things were supposed to work according to the left-brained “rules”.
I risk trying to systematize the right-brained symbolic via a left-brained approach… but I do think something key is missed if you try to associate the left-brained with the political and symbolic Left (though there are certainly many on the Left who exhibit left-brained pathology).
I agree that the parallels only hold within the strict confines of McGilchrist's models of attention, rather than in wider symbolic structures.
I don't think the hemispheres map as easily onto political orientation as suggested here. It would be somewhat true today, because the left is so extreme, but I think it's a bit more accurate to say that extremism, narcissism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy are associated with left hemisphere-thinking.
Yes, all of those things correlate to LH dysfunction. But they are also characteristic of the contemporary left.
Agreed!
You and your guest, John Carter gave a brilliant distillation of the work of Ian McGilchrist regarding the different functions of the right and left hemisphere of the brain. It was a sheer pleasure to listen to you both discuss the implications of this duel modality of consciousness, whether in our own lives or in its effect on civilization writ large.
I agree with John Carter’s supposition that the left hews towards a left brain character and the right towards a right hemisphere expression. I want to add to this idea, lest anyone miss it, that this is a temporal manifestation.
I was formerly and originally aligned with the political left. I can tell you that as an American on the left during the George W. Bush years, had I known this concept then, I could easily have made the reverse case. Today we can state that the right is (or was) passive to the left’s manic activism. A generation ago, the left quietly said amongst its members, that we don’t know how to be in power, but only stand outside the gates of power and make noises of opposition. Today the right creates hilarious memes that capture reality with simplicity, whereas the left creates The Wall of Text. Yesterday, the left ruled comedy. For most of the 2000s, the left were the playful ones with a sense of the absurd (right brained), while the right were often rigidly rule-based. Today the situation is reversed. The left once stood aghast as the right made war, vaingloriously imposing their will and self-image on distant regions (left brained). Today it is the left that carries out this same horrific folly.
You could argue that the Bush administration does not represent your values. I could argue that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton with their “third way” neoliberalism in no way represented the values of the traditional left.
My point is that left/right brain hemisphere does not code cleanly to left/right politics. As the right is ascendant politically in Western countries, it would serve us (on the right) well to remember not to be complacent, because these things can flip.
I thought John Carter gave a beautiful example of a right to left hemisphere migration in how science has changed. As he said, the first desire of those men long ago was to know the mind of God. Now look at the state of science! We have the replication crisis, hyper specialization and devout “scientism” that must not be questioned.
I think the master and his emissary at a civilizational level can be compared to the principal-agent problem. Fantastic ideas drift through the generations and become desiccated in their implementation.
The way I see it, we in the West have inherited certain notions from the Enlightenment that have finally deposited us on a barren, rocky shore. Among those notions, we hold rationality at the pinnacle of human intelligence. By doing so, we have become estranged from the creative spark that inspires. That spark contains rationality, but goes beyond it. It’s rather like mistaking our knowledge of science as a greater thing than creation and the cosmos itself.
We have within each one of us the emissary. Ian McGilchrist posits that we live in a left brain world. As such, perhaps it is easier for us to be more directly acquainted with the emissary. We can teach our emissary that it has real value as a servant, but that as a servant its value is only realized when its labours are offered back to the master. This is how the cycle is meant to be refreshed and perpetuated.