This video by RSA's chief executive, Matthew Taylor, interests and encourages me. Near the end he's asking if we can outgrow the limitations of the a world given to us by left-hemisphere dominant rationality that has been with us at least since the of Descartes. And he actually asks the old Aristotelian question that most late moderns and no-longer-moderns seem allergic to, the question about 'ends'. So this talk also builds nicely on Iain McGilchrist's ideas about the proper role of rationality as a servant. The 18th-century enlightenment mindset was flawed by its over valuing of left-brain rationality, and that led to the hall-of mirrors trap we find ourselves in now. Taylor says:
Rationality can tell us how best to get from A to Z, but without ethical reasoning, we cannot discuss where the Z should be. So what we aim for might be as important to our well being as what we achieve. . . . The 21st century enlightenment calls for us to look past simplistic and inadequate ideas of freedom, of justice, and of progress. Perhaps it's time to stop chasing those myths. To stop being transfixed by abstractions, and instead to reconnect a concrete understanding of who we are as human beings, the political debate about who we need to be, and the philosophical and even spiritual exploration of who we might aspire to be.
Abstractions as ends in themselves are death. They lead to all manner of Jacobinisms. And what we aim for can be inspired only by that which comes from outside the left-brain rationalist hall of mirrors. It must be inspired, and all truly creative people know what that means. Remember what McGilchrist said about the left hemisphere dominant view of the worldin the video posted with the previous post?
In our modern world we’ve developed something that looks awfully like the left hemisphere’s world. We prioritize the virtual over the real; the technical becomes important; bureaucracy flourishes. The picture, however, is fragmented. There's a lot of uniqueness; the How has become subsumed in What; and the need for control leads to a paranoia in society that we need to govern and control everything.
Why this shift? I think there are three reasons: One is the left hemisphere’s talk is very convincing because it shaves everything that it finds doesn’t fit with its model off and cuts it out. So this particular model is entirely self-consistent largely because it’s made itself so.
[Two] I also call the left hemisphere the Berlusconi of the brain because it controls the media. It’s very vocal on its own behalf. The right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice, and it can’t construct these same arguments.
And I also think rather more importantly that [Three] there’s a sort of hall of mirrors effect. The more we get trapped into this, the more we undercut and ironize things that might have led us out of it. And we just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know about what we know.
It's this hall of mirrors effect that has become for us the trap, particularly of the well-educated and clever. It's a problem for anyone who lives in a closed system. But McGilchrist's point is that the right brain works as a kind of receiver for information that comes from outside the hall of mirrors, and this information would lead us out of the trap if we would listen for it and heed it. The problem lies in that the information too often sounds like something clever people have heard before, thought about briefly, and rejected--cut out because it didn't fit preconceived rationalist criteria--when the real problem lies in that they haven't really understood it on its own terms. They've read the score, but missed the music.