Left, Right, or Center?

Left, Right, or Center?

The day after the election, flying back across the Atlantic — Edinburgh to Newark, Europe to the USA, headlines of British and Irish newspapers were full of it —“from this moment on, its going to be America First” , “Trump Offers A Fearful Vision”, “Trump’s New World Order Begins” A clenched fisted “America First”, “Trump is Hired YOU’RE FIRED”, “In God We Trust”, and in The (Glasgow) Herald —“The World Holds its Breath”. 

It was — is — good to be home here in the Hudson Valley after what was an intrepid January trip — over the sea to Skye — one of the most dramatic and darkly beautiful islands in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. We’d journeyed there to visit psychiatrist and literary scholar, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, and to chew over questions about our off-kilter world, about how human-nature is tinkering with the chemistry of the planet and thus with its — and our — future. 

Unpacking some of McGilchrist’s evolutionary answers from his decades of research into The Divided Brain is a prod for us to take a hard look at where we are, and why, and how, and to figure out what it would take to alter course — not least, because of the current destabilizing bluster and bungled state of American affairs. 

For those of us whipsawed, daily, by the increasingly divisive assault on democracy, perhaps it is a prudent time to remember what John Muir said a hundred years ago: —“that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”. McGilchrist’s expansive work on The Divided Brain — soon to be premiered in a “mind-altering” Canadian documentary — reflects Muir’s prescient perspective, so lost in our global shuffle. Thanks to neuroscience, we now have the benefit of a ground-breaking thesis to tackle the unhitched thinking that dominates the workings of the Western World!

As the Washington/Wall Street cabal takes over the country we’d be wise to heed McGilchrist’s warnings, distilled as they are from his extraordinarily wide fields of research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, history, literature, myth, art and music. His critical point::- without recognition of longer-term, big-picture thinking we’re leaving ourselves, our children, and all life-on-earth increasingly vulnerable to irreversible environmental, economic, social and political instability.

With more neural connections in our heads than the 100,000 galaxies in the universe — not exactly hard to compute that brains are a tad more complex than the old ‘emotion on the right, reason on the left’. In his momentous and much acclaimed volume from 2009 The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - McGilchrist defines the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between our brain’s separate lateral halves — left and right hemispheres. The left side now seen to be more fixed, analytic, mechanistic, systematizing, and detached, while the proclivities of the right, less verbal, more visual, flexible, synthesizing, and most crucially — contextual.

Paradoxically, the polarizing political Left and Right are the reverse of our brains! The short-sighted, authoritarian, silo’d metrics of the left-hemisphere pretty much tag the Republican Right, while the inclusive, less rigid, broader-based, unquantifiables of the right-hemisphere, closer to the Democratic Left. Worth noting that the less concise and more holistic Democratic platform is harder to sum-up and convey in succinct soundbites compared to the GOP’s sharp, hierarchical, proclamations.  

We are duly cautioned then, that by leaving the left-brain — which, by the way, “is the side that does not know what it does not know”! — to its customary power-hungry devices, it will keep compounding our increasingly fractious political and financial systems and their far-reaching consequences. That said, while McGilchrist credits the left-brain’s staggering scientific brilliance and stratospheric technological merits, he emphasizes our hemispheres naturally coexist and function together. Now, more than ever it is ours to differentiate and acknowledge each hemispheres’ fundamentally opposite sets of values and qualities to better judge where and how we go from here — while we still have time.

In the interest of stepping into fewer mine-fields and maintaining a focus on his invaluable and densely researched thesis on the right/left divide (one that’s controversial for some with left-brained leanings!) McGilchrist deliberately avoids touching on any parallel with gender opposites. He leaves it to us —  women, and thankfully also many men — who resonate with his unequivocal left-hemispheric affirmation and honoring of the right-hemisphere, to speak out for the ‘feminine’ principles of relatedness and intuition — ashamedly discounted for millennia.

When what unquestionably governs our world is a masculinized concept of priorities, McGilchrist’s neurologically (and physiologically) grounded position is a welcome ‘objective’ and credible argument adding muscle to the activism so many of us are engaged in. The very visible protests and marches — primarily and necessarily led by women — are a timely and wholly appropriate reaction to the deeply engrained and ancient levels of misogyny that remain all too painfully prevalent and disempowering today.

This new explanation of the personal and planetary price paid for society’s innate tendency to disregard the all-encompassing right-side of our brain calls on us to deepen our understanding of the complexities — and the consequences — of the human condition. 

The question then is, while the world holds its breath — whether we be woman or man — can we integrate enough of this knowledge to help ourselves and each other be at peace with the richness of our differences?  Can we act fairly enough — as individuals and collectively — to build a ‘center’ able to ‘hold the tension of the opposites’? Can we meet the challenge, together, to cultivate a more balanced and humane understanding — Left with Right? Can we do it before it’s too late…..for ourselves, and our forsaken Mother Earth?  

We’re all in the same boat, after all — and it is hitched to everything else in the Universe!