By A. C. Grayling
The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
By Iain McGilchrist (Yale University Press 597pp £25)
There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain’s asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least.
Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages – a further hundred are dense with notes and references in tiny print – as if it were an adventure story. And in one good sense it is. All the way through there is a single recurrent theme like a drumbeat, a theme McGilchrist thinks we urgently need to understand and do something about. It is that once we understand the structure and function of the brain, we see that the wrong half of it is in charge of our civilisation.
Now to return to that matter of jumping to the conclusion that what McGilchrist’s book seeks to do is, at very least, implausible. Alas, it is. The chief reason is that far too much is made to turn on the suppositious and slender state of knowledge in brain science. Although a great deal of intensely interesting work has been done and is being done in that field (McGilchrist tells us about the rapidly evolving technologies and experimental work in fascinating and lucid detail), nevertheless it simply does not permit such claims as that ‘the right hemisphere underpins our sense of justice’, ‘only the right hemisphere understands metaphor’, ‘the left hemisphere closes most routes to reality’, and the overarching claim for which McGilchrist argues, namely that the narrow, fragmenting, thing-based, mechanical, overly self-confident, black-and-white, unempathetic, even zombie-like left hemisphere is dominating our civilisation to its cost.
As this characterisation of the left hemisphere implies, the right hemisphere is McGilchrist’s favourite. Chapter after chapter is devoted to explaining and exploring the contrast between the two hemispheres, chiefly to the right hemisphere’s credit. It is more in touch with reality and life; it is global and integrating in its activity, creating a holistic view of the world; it recognises individuals, and is the seat of most forms of attention; it is the home of emotion and therefore of empathy and its offspring morality. To it belong music, art, religion and social connectedness. It is or should be the master hemisphere, but its quondam servant, the left hemisphere, whose job should be the instrumental and subordinate one of focusing on details and applying rational calculation when needed, has usurped it – principally because the left hemisphere’s chief interest, says McGilchrist, is power: it wants to divide and rule, and by underpinning the emergence of the analytic philosophy, science and bureaucratic organisation of the Western world in the last half dozen centuries, has succeeded in doing so.
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