Dark Side of the Moon/Brain By Brian Simpson

     Perhaps to get the book review going we need a little music; this classic from Pink Floyd (Money, from Dark Side of the Moon (1973) will do:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kcet4aPpQ&list=PLEQdwrAGbxncZFLH4KETau3-uncnqVtWD&index=6

     With the mood set, I turn to the task of mentioning two remarkable books in the metaphysics of the human mind, neurophilosophy: Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2010), and Roderick Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation, (Karnac Books, London, 2013). These are big, heavy books, physically and intellectually. The Master and His Emissary, which  is  very profound, focusses upon the division of the human brain into left and right hemispheres. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and is responsible for logical, spatial and ore academic processes and reasoning, including analytic thought, logic, mathematics and science and right handed control. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and is the more “intuitive” centre, with artistic and creative properties, intuition and control of the left hand. As we know, most people are right handed, across all races, so human civilisation has been dominated by the left hemisphere, especially in the West.

     In 522 pages McGilchrist shows in great detail how this received view of neurophilosophy is only partially correct, as the two hemispheres have different personalities. There is an enormous quantity of neurophysiological material discussed in the book, but the most conclusive evidence of this comes from split brain patients where by operations to control epilepsy, the connecting tissue which communicates between the hemispheres, the corpus callosium is cut. This results in literally two brains in the one body. Often the two “people” can get into conflict, with one arm opposing another, but this is not frequent. But, it does show that the human mind is divided. As well, there has been a domination of the rational/logic side in the West, an over-balance that has not been healthy, and in fact has been responsible for the production of a nihilistic culture from this imbalance.

     McGilchrist argues, with a detailed historical commentary dating from the Greek philosophers, through to the Enlightenment, and to the postmodern “thinkers” of today, that the reductionist imbalances of modern thought are neuropathologies, symptoms of a malfunctioning brain: “The world loses reality. People who have lost significant right-hemisphere function experience a world from which meaning has been drained, where vitality appears attenuated, and where things themselves seem insubstantial, to lack corporeal solidity. Because of the sense of detachment, such people can begin to doubt the actuality of what they see, wondering if it is in fact all ‘playacting’, a pretence, unreal.” (p.191f.)

     This brain damage is transferred to the broader culture, and is seen today most clearly in the pathologies of the Arts/Humanities: “With post-modernism, meaning drains away. Art becomes a game in which the emptiness of a wholly insubstantial world, in which there is nothing beyond the set of terms we have in vain used to ‘construct’ meaning, is allowed to speak for its own vacuity. The set of terms are now seen simply to refer to themselves. They have lost transparency; and all conditions that would yield meaning have been ironized out of existence.” (p.422f.)  This is essentially an intellectual form of schizophrenia:

“In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia. In either group, subjects find it difficult to understand context, and therefore have problems with pragmatics, and with appreciating the ‘discourse elements’ of communication. They have similar problems in understanding tone, interpreting facial expressions, expressing and interpreting emotions, and understanding the presuppositions that lie behind another’s point of view. They have similar problems with Gestalt perception and the understanding and grasping of wholes. They have similar problems with intuitive processing, and similar deficits in understanding metaphor. Both exhibit problems with appreciating narrative, and both tend to lose a sense of the natural flow of time, which becomes substituted by a succession of moments of stasis. Both report experiencing the related Zeitraffer phenomenon in visual perception (something that can sometimes be seen represented in the art works of schizophrenic subjects).

Both appear to have a deficient sense of the reality or substantiality of experience (‘it’s all play-acting’), as well as of the uniqueness of an event, object or person. Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense. In both there is a loss of the stabilizing, coherence-giving, framework-building role that the right hemisphere fulfils in normal individuals. Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focused attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualizing and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualized analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise - for example, to scrutinize the behavior of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behavior. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the left-hemisphere’s view of the world… (p.392).”

     The solution to all of these problems is  ... difficult. It involves nothing less than a revolution in cultural activities to revive the right side of the brain, by education, and lifestyle. This process needs to occur in all aspects of society, especially the universities, which have for at least one hundred years, been in the most rigid of utilitarian left brain frameworks, dominated by brain-damaged persons. Here is a good summary of this process of decay:

“Universities were effectively taken over by people with malfunctioning brains. As universities became increasingly important for the functioning of the economy, an increasing number of academics were appointed with purely utilitarian interests. This provided an environment in which people with left hemisphere dominated brains could flourish and then dominate universities. Techno-scientists largely eliminated fundamental research inspired by the quest to understand the world, along with scientists inspired by this quest, thereby almost crippling efforts to develop a postmechanistic science. It was not only engineering and the sciences that were affected, however. As universities expanded, arts faculties also were colonized by people with malfunctioning brains who then fragmented inquiry and inverted the values of their disciplines. Rejecting the anti-nihilist tradition that McGilchrist has embraced, most philosophy departments in Anglophone countries, and following them in continental Europe, were taken over by people who transformed philosophy into academic parlour games.

Literature departments were taken over by people who debunked the very idea of literature. The humanities generally came to be dominated by postmodernists who rejected the quest to inspire people with higher values (as described by Scheler) as elitist. They called for permanent revolution – of high-tech commodities, thereby serving the transnational high-tech corporations who produce these commodities. Then, at a time when the globalization of the economy began to undermine democracy and the global ecological crisis began to threaten the conditions for humanity’s continued existence, careerist managers, with the support of politicians and backed by business corporations, took control of universities, transforming them from public institutions into transnational corporations, imposing their left hemisphere values in the process.”
http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/290/587

     To begin to even start controlling the runaway dominance of the left brain, the universities thus need to be controlled, and this alone is no easy task. James Reed convincingly argues that they are beyond redemption and reform, and thus need to be closed down, and replaced by other non-lethal bodies. Roderick Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere can be seen as a complementary book to McGilchrist’s, taking a different focus, but still pursuing the general theme of the metaphysics of the divided human brain. Here, however, the poet William Blake (1757-1827), with his view of the imagination as the connecting tissue between the two sides of the brain, is given a detailed discussion, in the light of scientific research by neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor, who is mentioned by McGilchrist, but not discussed in depth. Blake recognised even in his day, as probably the whole sprit of the Romantic movement did, that the left side of the brain can be obsessive and dogmatic, and we are very far down that road now, perhaps in a terminal state. Blake called this the “Spectre,” an imaginative term.

     In conclusion, both books raise fundamental problems about the sustainability of Western civilisation, and that includes much of Asia now, which has embraced the path of scientific and technological reductionism. The point, in a nutshell, is that such scientific cultures will be mentally pathological, and in the longer term self-undermining because they are in denial of a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. They deny the other half of the sky, or more precisely, the other half of the mind. No good is coming from this.