The Master and his Emissary

A Summary of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

The Master and His Emissary is an alarmingly prescient exploration of how the mind shapes reality. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that as a society we are losing our mental acuity as we become ever more inclined to a reductive mechanistic view of reality. McGilchrist ties this to the physiology of the brain. The brain is structurally and functionally asymmetrical. One side tends to ground experience in context. It’s intuitive, synthesizing, and integrative. The other is more analytic. This analytic side clarifies by unpacking information and then passing the information back to the side that is more broadly focused where the new information is reintegrated back into an enriched whole. McGilchrist describes this as a system of opponent processors containing “mutually opposed elements, each with contrary influence allowing finely calibrated responses to complex situations.”¹ It’s like using one hand to push against the other for added stability when making extremely fine movements. The different hemisphere functions are useful for learning to perform various tasks like making music. We are attracted to the piece as a whole. Then we begin to break it down into notes and repeating patterns. Eventually we take those individual components and put them back into the whole. The one hemisphere deals more with the whole piece of music and the other engages with the individual notes and patterns more mechanistically. At some point, after much practice, we stop playing the individual notes and begin regenerating the piece as a whole.

Another way to look at this is how we reckon with the objects we encounter. When we look at an automobile the integrative side of the brain broadly sees a car while the mechanistic side sees an intricate arrangement of parts. To the mechanistic side the parts are exact and discrete. This side values consistency. It applies the same basic model to each part. The integrative side of the brain is more concerned with the whole car. It is less exacting. It allows tolerances on individual parts in order to integrate them into the whole. The mechanistic way of looking at things is really useful for grasping and manipulating tools and for building a car. But it can be counterproductive when dealing with disparate things. When the mechanistic side encounters an apparent contradiction that it cannot easily reconcile, for example matter and consciousness, it tends to just deny one element or the other. Daniel Dennett epitomizes this way of dealing with apparent contradiction in his book that purports to explain consciousness.² Rather than explaining consciousness, Dennett explains it away. According to McGilchrist, this type of naïve reductionist scientism is characteristic of the mechanistic side of the brain. It offers simple answers, frequently in the form of technological solutions. This is attractive, in part, because it can be easily articulated. The integrative side has more of a challenge. It relies on narrative and metaphor to convey implied meaning.

We live in an era and culture that leans heavily towards the mechanistic side. “Articulating and making explicit… are treated as a mark of truth, and their inverse are treated with increasing suspicion.”³ Today, metaphor and narrative are easily discarded as myths or lies. McGilchrist is particularly concerned because the natural world, the human body, culture, tradition, religion, and art have been so thoroughly de-constructed that they can no longer help us see intuitively beyond this hermetically sealed world of the mechanistic mind. As a result, we are becoming more limited in what we see, less capable of understanding what we do see, and even less aware of these limitations. The following is McGilchrist’s thesis in his own words:

I have come to believe that the cerebral hemispheres differ in ways that have meaning. There is a plethora of well-substantiated findings that indicate that there are consistent differences – neuropsychological, anatomical, physiological and chemical, amongst others – between the hemispheres. But when I talk of ‘meaning’, it is not just that I believe there to be a coherent pattern to these differences. That is a necessary first step. I would go further, however, and suggest that such a coherent pattern of differences helps to explain aspects of human experience, and therefore means something in terms of our lives, and even helps explain the trajectory of our common lives in the Western world.

My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.⁴

The mechanistic mind looks at matter and energy and that is all it sees. Anything that doesn’t fit this model is shaved off. We conclude that beauty, joy, suffering, evil are not actually real because they are not matter and energy and we know that only matter and energy are real because we know that we know. McGilchrist likens this to a hall of mirrors. A society captured in this dysfunctional madhouse finds it hard to get out of the mechanistic fragmented decontextualized virtual world that it created, particularly when traditional routes of escape through art and religion have been blocked off. This is the type of society that embraces technology and bureaucracy. It sees virtually no other solutions. This mechanistic vision of the world is…

a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value.

This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.⁵

We are not merely shaped by our environment; our habits of thinking shape the world into its own image. Functional shifts occur in the brain that are initiated by imitation of beliefs and practices, ways of seeing the world and ways of being in the world. These shifts can favor one hemisphere or another. Epigenetic mechanisms can give them permanence by replicating the brain changes that go with such habits in subsequent generations. Such shifts in emphasis can be seen throughout various periods in the history of Western Civilization including the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, all the way through to today’s post-modernism. As we imitate and acquire mechanistic ways of being in the world this mindset can become entrenched. McGilchrist believes this is what’s happening today. He observes an ‘asymmetry of interaction’ between the two hemispheres in modern society. Instead of each hemisphere fitting together intelligently to form a single coherent entity, the mechanistic side has been externalized in the world around it. “In our contemporary world, skills have been downgraded and subverted into algorithms: we are busy imitating machines.”⁶

Instead of celebrating all this as a sign of health and progress, we should consider what we’re inflicting on ourselves, i.e. pathologic disorder and social disintegration. We need to recognize this as the existential threat that it is to Western Civilization, and perhaps to our collective humanity.

The most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world… The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation. This means we have a grave responsibility, a word that captures the reciprocal nature of the dialogue we have with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.⁷

To the mechanistic mind the world is deterministic. We are pushed along by causes that precede us. But what if the world is not a mechanism? Are we not also “pulled, drawn, attracted forward towards and by things that have a sort of magnetic power (such as archetypes), rather than pushed or prodded forward by what’s happened?”⁸ And do we not have some degree of say in the direction we are pulled? We owe a lot to our genes. It’s genes that are largely responsible for making us adept imitators. Humans are better at imitation than any other animal. This ‘meta-skill’ of imitation, or mimesis, allows us to acquire an array other skills. It’s the gift of ‘skill acquisition.’ “The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because, not only as individuals but as a species, we will become what we imitate.”⁹ So how are we to decide what skills and behaviors to imitate? The way we direct our attention, aims, and values is of the utmost importance as these largely determine what we become. Yet reductionist thinking blunts our ability to understand what is happening to us and what to do about it. Science and reason cannot tell us where we should direct our attention. They do not tell us what our aims ought to be. And they cannot inform us on what we should value. As a result, we consent to marketing campaigns that co-opt our attention everywhere we turn, including on the devices in our home and in our pocket. We design school curriculum to perpetuate an illusion of value neutrality. Underlying it all are unspoken values that go unquestioned. It’s never explained why tolerance has suddenly been elevated as the highest virtue or why science and reason trump intuition and imagination. The fact that we cannot properly apply science or reason without intuition and imagination is completely ignored. Likewise, we cannot direct our aims properly in this state. Self-indulgent pleasure becomes our defacto aim when we fail to acknowledge the possibility of any higher purpose. We fail to see the obvious truth in our own analogy; that every mechanism is built for some purpose. The mechanistic mode of being is sterile as far as it relates to questions of value, meaning, and purpose. The fact that many in our society dismiss such questions as unintelligible, unanswerable, and uninteresting is a sign of sickness.

_{This post originally appeared on October 27, 2021.}

A Summary of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

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