View this email in your browser

Can Iain McGilchrist reunite Science and the Sacred?

How significant is Iain McGilchrist’s work? It’s hard to know for sure. But at the launch of his new book last Monday, the philosopher Jonathan Rowson said McGilchrist’s latest epic work, The Matter With Things, might, just might, one day be seen as a seminal piece of philosophy on the level of Kant or Hegel. 

What can be said - and something explored in the interview with Iain we are releasing today on Rebel Wisdom - is that McGilchrist’s work provides a rigorously scientific account of the world that makes space for a re-integration of the divine. The hope is that Iain’s work has the potential to cross over to the skeptics and rationalists, and help heal the split between the scientific and the sacred. 

“What I wish is for people to make contact again with the vision of a world that is not a heap of pointless fragments, that is not chaotic, ugly and without meaning, not just one in which we are the playthings of chance and embroiled in a war of all against all”, Iain told Rebel Wisdom. “But one that is beautiful, intrinsically complex, rich, conscious and responsive.”

The Matter With Things is quite a tome. Coming off ten years of dedicated research and contemplation - 600,000 words, over 1,000 pages, 1.5 million words - it follows up and extends the thinking outlined in The Master and his Emissary, a 2009 text that recast popular science understandings around the left-right hemisphere dichotomy. 

Common understanding claims that the left hemisphere of the brain is ‘logical’, and the right more ‘intuitive’ and ‘creative’. While an obvious oversimplification, the pop science trope does point at something, McGilchrist found - it’s just the true story is much subtler. 

Rather, the left hemisphere has evolved to ‘apprehend’, allied to the grasping function of the hand, and our need to manipulate and control our immediate environments. The right hemisphere, however, is rooted in a receptive understanding of the world - a ‘comprehending’, whose broad, open awareness matches up with the deep focus invested in the left. Both left and right are of deep value and import, and each needs the other - yet from the Enlightenment onwards, McGilchrist suggests, our culture has systematically over-prized the left hemisphere, and pushed the right onto the scrapheap. 

Crucially, our hemispheric imbalance is underwritten by a number of faulty assumptions now running our culture. Rationalism, empiricism, utilitarianism, materialism: all useful and filled with profound truth, but they aren’t exhaustive. 

They divorce matter and mind, separate subject and object, break apart our world into fragments, and - especially when aligned with predatory capitalism - reduce meaning to the use-value of those fragments for consumption. This ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world has been at play for decades, of course. It was noticed and prophesied by the likes of Jung and Nietzsche. Yet it’s arguably become the predominant and solely-permissible worldview to take in our cultural mainstream. Discussions of the sacred and the spiritual are liable to make people cringe - ‘the science’ is our gospel, without any real nuance about how science is done and whether it can answer all our questions. And even if it were true, the ‘arch-rationalist’ vision doesn’t seem to meet our deepest needs. 

Consider the sudden and eruptive popularity of Jordan Peterson’s decoding of the Bible in 2018, the rising use of psychedelic drugs, the revival of Stoicism and other wisdom traditions, or the growing interest of many cultural thinkers in the West’s Christian heritage - including the writer Paul Kingsnorth, who’s due to appear with Rebel Wisdom on 22nd November. Consider, too, the attention placed on John Vervaeke’s work, which - while difficult, dense and extensive - has garnered attention from thousands of everyday people. So much so, in fact, that a ‘lay’ Rebel Wisdom documentary on John’s work is in the pipeline, and currently inviting contributions and ideas from our fanbase and network. 

“Things like love and spirituality and the greatness of art and music and all these things - because they can’t be measured and they can’t be reduced in mechanical terms to a materialist mechanistic explanation - ‘they have no value’. Well, meaning they’re ‘illusions’”, McGilchrist says. “But that itself is an illusion… What I believe is that we are literally deluded about the nature of reality and that is helping us ‘unmake’ the world. We’re dismantling a world that is intrinsically rich, complex and beautiful, and instead replacing it with a heap of garbage.

“...I want to ask the question, ‘Who are we? What is the world like and how do we relate [to it]? And I think this loss lies behind so many of our predicaments…: the destruction of the forests, the poisoning of the seas, the change of climate, the eradication of both the habitat and the ways of life of indigenous people around the globe. All these catastrophes, they have something in common, they stem from a certain way of thinking.”

The Matter With Things makes a continuous argument for a re-enchantment, and a ‘re-making’, of our world. It begins with neuropsychology - a study of how our brains shape reality and what we mean by truth. To re-balance our addiction to linear, fragmentary thought, McGilchrist calls for stable attention, embodiment, and different kinds of intelligence (including the emotional and social).

From there, the book’s Part 2 looks to questions of epistemology, or how we know anything at all - including a revised notion of what science and reason should be, and how they always need intuition and imagination to function. Part 3, the book’s most radical section, makes a deep launch into metaphysics, or the nature of the cosmos and the ‘Unforeseen Nature of Reality’.

Rather than things ‘in here’, McGilchrist argues, our deepest anchors of meaning are real ‘things’ ‘out there’ to be plumbed, discovered and invested. Through our strict binaries of subject and object, we’ve confused ‘objectivity’ for inertness, and forgotten that the cosmos itself is suffused with an all-powerful creative force - one that McGilchrist is willing (albeit cautiously) to call God. Certain principles are core to its fabric. The coincidentia oppositorum, or the ‘coincidence of opposites’ seen always and everywhere - from electromagnetic poles to the culture wars tearing our politics apart. The ‘one and the many’, or the necessary interdependence of finitude and infinity. The necessity of time. 

“We carry a kind of moral responsibility for whatever it is that goes on in the cosmos, because we are not just [here] in a passive way. Part of this creative cosmos has [already] been created, but also we are part of the process of creating what comes”, McGilchrist says. Far from our lives being pointless and worthless and meaningless, there is, if you like, a moral weight to our existence, which is to do our best to attend openly and without judgement, to what is: to see what is there, to respond to it and to encourage it more into being.”

On whether our culture can or will revise its deepest assumptions, McGilchrist is pessimistic. The chronic penetration of social media and digital technology has made left-brain thinking the easier - and, increasingly, the only - option for navigating our everyday. Without a kind of cognitive-perceptual revolution, it seems that our meta-crisis will only grow in intensity.

Yet maybe that makes our role in the re-enchantment that bit more meaningful. 

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.