This is the title of Iain McGilchrist's important new book. It's subtitle is "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". The video below summarizes very succinctly and broadly the argument he's making, but it's based on a story by Nietzsche:
There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted.
Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he trusted most to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not influence, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.
McGilchrist comments: At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however, gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.
Echoes of Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor story, no? Or Prospero and Antonio?
Have you ever wondered why there are these historical moments, renaissance moments, that bloom and fade: 5th-century Athens, 15th century Florence, Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? Why can't these moments be sustained? Well, McGilchrist has an unusual take on it that is rooted in hemispheric brain research. So he starts from characterizations about the roles the right and left hemispheres play in the way individual human beings relate to reality, but it's particularly interesting for its implications about the way human beings develop their collective habits of mind--their cultures, their politics, and economics.
The right brain is the Master, and the left is the Emissary; people and cultures begin to decay as soon as the emissary begins to think it no longer needs the master. Left-brained scientistic and bureacratic thinking sees itself as the master of its domains, but it's not. And that's why they are so arrogant, because they have forgotten whom they serve. The first claims to serve the truth, but it is such an attenuated, meaningless notion of truth as to be worthless. The second claims to be serving the public, but all bureaucracies serve themselves and their own institutional interests first. And both modes of left brain thinking are all about control and about filtering out or de-legimitating whatever they cannot control.
If you have ten minutes to spare, watch the RSA video. It mainly focuses on how the right and brain hemisphers function, how they relate to one another, and suggests at the end the price we pay when the left brain operates independently from the right.
I have the book on order, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet. But anybody who has been a long-time reader here can see how it relates to themes I've developed over the years.
I also want to relate it to my recent involvement in Public Schools and the politics of education reform. The reformers are egregiously left-brained in their understanding the of the challenges, and the results have been predicatably disastrous.
I've characterized the the conflict as one between technocrats and humanists, but the humanists are at a very severe disadvantage, not only because they haven't near the money or the media megaphone that the technocrats have, but because they don't really have a coherent, legitimated world view that gives them a strong place to stand and fight back. The video clip above refers to the difficulty when it talks about the Berlusconi function of the left brain. It controls the messaging, and it tends to filter out anything that does not fit its preconceptions.
Many people who are inclined to be open to humanist thinking feel ambivalently about it because they have come to accept that the discussion is to be held on left-brain terms following left-brain rules, and so the humanist cannot talk about the colors red, green, and blue in a discussion where the rules stipulate that only black and white are permitted. The argument, therefore, is lost from the get-go because the master, the part of us that has the most important things to say, is locked up in the back room bound in chains.
More when I've had a chance to read the book.
UPDATE: Interesting review of the book here.