Transcript excerpt from: "Iain McGilchrist: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" | The Great Simplification #85" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ follows:
"Human beings are not just the squalid competitive apes that we are made out to be. We have many interesting traits. We are social animals. We know how to sacrifice for another. And indeed the history of evolution is as much a history of cooperation as it is of competition. Competition's very important of course, but the cooperation has been neglected, and we do know how to cooperate.
And when we're working well, both the hemispheres cooperate with one another and we cooperate with one another. So I mean, the history of the West is the one that I know best. I haven't attempted to write about the history of the East, though I suspect it will tell a different story until very recently when it seems to have become occidentalized in the most lamentable way, taking all our worst sins upon it. But anyway, yeah, I mean I think that is right.
Wisdom is always going to be relatively rare and involves a lot of things. It involves the putting together of a life well lived and the experience that comes from that with an understanding of history, a sense of the spiritual and an ability to aggregate information. But at the moment, I'd say that information is triumphing over a true understanding and an understanding is what intelligence requires and means.
So that much of the time we are amassing information and we kind of know in a technical way certain things we probably know more in that sense than humanity has ever known. But we're also, in my view, less wise than humanity has ever been, this fact that we can know things and can do things has gone to our heads and made us hubristic, vain and ridiculous because we think we can solve everything, but we don't understand a half of what we've got hold of here. So I think AI is a problem, yeah.
So how does that map from an individual to a culture? Because as individuals, we have left hemispheres and right hemispheres, and we have a corpus callosum that divides them and is getting larger over time, implying that there's some narrative control going on, but our culture doesn't have a left or a right hemisphere. So is it just the proportion of the population that is kind of tilted in one direction that periodically, you said there were a couple historical cultures that flourished because they had more of a balanced... What's the difference between individuals, population and the whole culture with respect to this phenomenon?
Yes, it's a reasonable question. Of course, I'm not suggesting that physically the brain has changed enormously since 2000 years ago. It will have changed a bit because it's always evolving, but it's not that I'm referring to. It's that we use the brain in different ways. We can choose to listen to one part of the brain more than another.
And I think that what happens as a society becomes a powerful civilization, a number of things happen. One is that it overreaches itself either in terms of its territory or its military and economic power. And in doing that, it needs to be able to control or thinks it needs to be able to control an ever vaster panoply of elements in human life. And to do that, it needs to simplify, to roll out, as we say, a bureaucratic system and so forth.
So as a civilization becomes too large and overreaches itself, it moves more and more towards a kind of left hemisphere thinking that helps it with the map, the theory, the diagram of life rather than the actual business of life. And I think the other thing that happens, well, there are many things that happen. I think there are about half a dozen that I refer to in the preface to The Matter With Things. Sorry, the preface to The Master and His Emissary, and take much further in The Matter With Things.
But one is something that the great philosopher A.N. Whitehead said that "A civilization thrives until it overanalyzed itself." And I think what's happening in our world is we don't really live connected so much to nature. We don't live connected to a spiritual tradition. We don't live connected to our history and culture. Our art has become too intellectualized. It's become too conceptual, not powerful, visceral and metaphoric in its nature as most great art is.
And so we've been cut loose and we're all kind of at a loss and when we try to talk to one another across these spaces, we tend to talk in very theoretical terms, so people talk about a theory of politics, a theory of economics, and a theory of how people behave and so on. Usually this is inaccurate, over simple. And so it's that that gets us into this frame of mind because the left hemisphere's message is money for old root. It's incredibly simple. We are just apes that compete for territory, money and power. That's the left hemisphere's knowledge because, let me put it this way, the left hemisphere's wrizzled edge is to make us powerful, to help us grab things.
It controls the right hand, which for most of us is the one which we do the grabbing and the manipulating, and it helps us maintain power. But all the rest of the understanding of everything else that humans are capable of, the life, the spirit, the life of morality, of beauty, of goodness, of truth, all these things are somehow left out of this picture and become somehow marginalized or trivialized as they have done, I believe in our culture at the moment.
And so why I wrote The Matter With Things was because I could see that we all agree there is something that is the matter with things. Very few people think everything's going fine right now, but it's also a notice of the facts that we overvalue matter in the most simple sense. I actually say that materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter because matter is a very extraordinary thing. Matter is wonderful, but this kind of simple idea of matter is what we tend to overestimate the power of, the consciousness and the spirit, the mind is somehow a secondary secretion of matter which it cannot be, and that we've made a world up out of things, which is how the left hemisphere puts things together. Whereas I believe the importance in everything lies in relationship, not in what we call the things themselves that are related."