The Master and His Emissary

The Divided Brain and Our Disillusion

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My anxiety always seems to intermingle with my reading. The more I read (not necessarily the news, which would be fairly justifiable) the more my brain goes on its own tangents, the more it comes to its own conclusions, the more it gifts me generously with an overall underpinning of existential dread. This, according to Iain McGilchrist, the author of “The Master and His Emissary”, is presumably due to an over-activation of the hyper-focused left hemisphere, in conflict with my more reasonable, vigilant right hemisphere.

The book's title comes from a story in Nietzsche: there once was a wise, selfless ruler under whom the land and people flourished. Over time his domain spread, and with it, he needed to trust the emissaries which he sent to ensure the safety of the more distant regions. Over time, one of his emissaries grew to think he was wiser than his master, and he did what he could to dispose of him. Once accomplished, the emissary took reign, the domain became a tyranny, and eventually fell to ruins. This, says McGilchrist, is what has happened to Western civilization. Though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. Our present civilization finds itself in the hands of the emissary, our left hemisphere, which is not as logical, or rational as it is praised to be. At all. In fact, McGilchrist has found that while it is possible to be a fully functioning human being without a working left hemisphere (more or less only speech would be deterred), functioning in “reality” with your left hemisphere alone is extremely difficult. People with a right hemisphere stroke (so, a functioning left hemisphere) become largely emotionless, schizophrenic, and blind to the thoughts and feeling of others.

Our western society has been looked upon as a sick patient with an unknown illness. People differ on when it began, but for a long time very few have been satisfied with it. Schopenhauer, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Chomsky, Eliot, Marcel, to name a few, all knew something was very wrong. Marx, for example, thought he could find the cause in socio-economic factors. Kierkegaard saw the sickness from a religious perspective. Nietzsche saw it in the people, in herd-men and nay-sayers, and put his faith in the Übermensch, the superman, who, alone, could finally free himself.

To fully understand the difference between the left and right hemisphere, lets imagine a world wherein the left hemisphere (the emissary) were the sole conveyer of reality. Firstly, our vision, the things we saw, would be entirely unreadable. The left brain is detail oriented and cannot see the whole, and so would turn our world into fragments of information. What more, unlike the right hemisphere who alone is capable of seeing the world intact, the left hemisphere is completely oblivious to the happenings of the left side of the world:

Image taken from “The Master and His Emissary”

A left hemisphere run world would increase in both abstraction and depersonalization. Fewer people would do work involving contact with the real world. Art would be completely lost, unless it was extremely abstracted. The left brain finds it impossible to understand metaphors, jokes, anything which is not true to its word. It is unable to see context from a scattered whole:

Once you see the Dalmatian, you cannot unsee it.

Laughter would, overtime, be stripped from our oesophagus's. There would be no sense of uniqueness. Increasingly the living would be modeled on the machine. Morality would be judged on a utilitarian basis. The impersonal would replace the personal. Material objects would take reign over the living. Social bonds will be neglected, and solitude will take its place. There would be a focus on immaterial objects at the expense of the living. Bonds between people would be seen as inconvenient. Exploitation rather than cooperation would become the norm.

In general, the left hemisphere is unconcerned with the feelings of others, and social interactions would be performed with an overall disregard for feelings. Common sense would be lost, as it relies on the collaboration of both hemispheres. Religion becomes a fantasy, and art would become increasingly abstracted.

Sounds awfully familiar, right? While the right hemisphere is open and inclusive, and sees the world as a global whole, the left hemisphere views reality as segmented and feelingless. The right hemisphere can grapple with and enjoys metaphors, symbolism, jokes and ambiguity, while the left hemisphere cannot make sense of anything but the literal, and will alway bring us back to the familiar.

Though switching the right hemisphere off completely in everybody without some occasion for it (injury, tumor, etc.) is an impossibility, over the past centuries our western culture has progressively shifted to the left, and neglected the right. As we can imagine, a world run by the left hemisphere will, like the story of the master and his emissary, turn into a tyranny.

So, while I now understand why we feel the way we feel, and why some (like myself) are more prone to anxiety than others), I also think this understanding justifies my feelings. Not only is a left-hemisphere dominated world a scary place to live in, it also does not sound so different from the one we are already inhabiting today. What more, if our sense of reality is so dependent on the hemisphere from which we perceive it, then what really is reality? Fine, I’ll leave that for next time.