The Left Hemisphere World

A deeper dive into the left hemisphere's take on the world

I have introduced you to the different ways our brain hemispheres experience the world, according to the wonderful writings of Iain McGilchrist (2009), here, and here. In the following post I’ll attempt to summarise the perspective of the left hemisphere, based on McGilchrist’s conclusion (2009, pp428-462) titled The Master Betrayed¹. You may find some clues here as to the nature of the world today, for all that can be said about an individual brain, could be said of the collective.

Just as in the Nietzche story about the emissary usurping the master (see footnote 1), let us imagine a world where the left hemisphere has become the dominant half of the brain, essentially suppressing the lead and guidance of the right hemisphere². The most obvious take on the world would include:

• A narrow and restricted focus on detail while missing the big picture and being unable to appreciate a coherent overview, or the “broad strokes” (in whatever domain - social, ecological, political, scientific, etc). Such broad strokes or big pictures would be disregarded because of the perceived lack of detail and clarity, and as such be deemed as insignificant.

• Increasing myopic focuses of attention, however, would become very important, playing out in highly specialised and technical fields with disregard to the surrounding broader context.

• Technical knowledge, information gathering, cataloguing and labelling, becomes more important that experiential knowledge, intuition, and gaining embodied skill.

• Theoretical and abstract notions become more convincing than anything concrete - abstractions abound. Anything that can’t be reduced to an algorithm, a procedure, and regulated by administrators, would be suspect - if it cannot be reduced to comprehensible components, it cannot be trusted.

• The world would become more virtualised - experienced through meta-representations - the most direct example being the life lived in the metaverse (a computer generated, virtual reality, that emulates reality). More people would work apart from the ‘lived’ world in bureaucratic processes, justifying and documenting their work of justification and documentation, without actually touching the real world.

• Technology flourishes in its development and expression and reflection of the left hemisphere’s perspective and desire to manipulate the world with tools for pleasure and utility. This creates a “room of mirrors” effect where the technology mirrors the left hemisphere’s perspective, validating it, and encouraging more of the same technology that will reflect more of the same perspective.

• Everything is seen in terms of its utility. The question always is “What is its value?”, followed closely by “How do we categorise it?”

• Everything, and everybody, becomes an abstraction - lacking context - able to be analysed by its constituent components.

• Living things would be conceived and understood as mechanical (the spiritual does not exist or is ignored) and manipulated as so. The volume, speed, and precision of the utility of things differentiates “good” machines from “bad”. Quantity trumps quality in this left hemisphere world.

• Numbers are trusted and used to manipulate and respond to people and their circumstances, which often seem so imprecise, intangible, ungraspable, and unable to fit into a neat category.

• The generic mechanical approach replaces the personal individual approach and society is driven by an impersonal automatised bureaucracy that is exploitive rather than co-operative.

• Paranoia and the need to control society would reign supreme - as anything that cannot be “grasped” by the left hemisphere cannot be controlled, and therefore not able to be trusted.

  • “Panoptical³ control would become an end in itself, and constant CCTV monitoring, interception of private information and communication, the norm. Measures such as a DNA database would be introduced apparently in response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances, against which they would in reality be ineffective, their aim being to increase the power of the state and diminish the status of the individual.” (McGilchrist, 2009, p.431)

• Individuals are just interchangeable parts of a mechanistic system so the control by the State, for the sake of efficiency, is inevitable.

• Families and roles in society that transcend regulation by the State would be seen as suspicious, especially anything altruistic, which the left hemisphere cannot understand, and would have to be brought under bureaucratic control.

• Similarly religion, anything supernatural, and the art that brings a sense of wonder to the heart would be resented, and need to be deconstructed and de-mystified. The implicit would be discarded for the explicit, and art, language, religion, culture in general, would become overly explicit, without the power of the implicit, metaphorical and intangible nature of these things.

There is more, but this is enough for now. The left hemisphere world would become an impersonal bureaucracy, ruled by technocrats, and everybody and everything exploited for everything it’s worth. Numbers, finance, utility, is all that matters as everything is placed on an an enormous balance sheet. Two-dimensional, sharp, precise, without context or the bigger picture - just a balance sheet - just numbers - just a bottom line.

Sounds like the world we are becoming doesn’t it? The frightening thing is that we are being conditioned by technology and our own left-brain bias that this is the only⁴, and right, reality. And we keep creating technology, governing, and social norms to reinforce that perception.

So how do we escape the left hemisphere’s self-created hall of mirrors? McGilchrist suggests there are 3 areas: the body, the soul, and art.

Although the left hemisphere plays a part in realising each of these realms of experience, the right hemisphere plays the crucial grounding role in each of them: the ‘lived’ body, the spiritual sense, and the experience of emotional resonance and aesthetic appreciation are all principally right-hemisphere mediated. What is more they each have an immediacy which bypasses the rational and the explicitness of language, and therefore leads directly to territory potentially outside of the left hemisphere’s sphere of control. These areas therefore present a serious challenge to it’s dominion, and they have evoked a determined response from the left hemisphere in our age. (McGilchrist, 2009, p.438)

Next time we will explore these three areas of body, soul/spirit, and art, as we escape mass psychosis!

---

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

1. The “Master” being the right hemisphere and the “Emissary” being the left. The story of The Master and His Emissary was taken from McGilchrist’s memory of a story by Nietzche, and the story goes something like this…

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 most trusted 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 wisdom, and on his missions on the 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.

2. And please do not make any relationship between the left and right hemispheres and left and right politics - only the left hemisphere would attempt to force such a relationship.

3. including everything visible in one view

4. From split-brain studies we know the left hemisphere has a propensity to believe it is absolutely right, even with the flimsiest (or no) evidence, and cannot see it’s own errors - it will always shift the blame, deflect, or outright deny it is wrong, incorrect or at fault.