Reading The Master and His Emissary
Insights and take-aways from Iain McGilchrist's massive book about the divided brain and how the West was made.
Old Souls and Big Books
A group of like-minded colleagues and friends get together each summer and tackle a “big book.” The idea is that though we have great designs on patiently wading through massive "important” tomes, few of us have the discipline to go it alone. So, this summer the “Old Souls” club settled upon Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 The Master and His Emissary. It clocks in at 462 pages, but the font is small and the margins are narrow. And of course, as a humanities guy, the review of the scientific literature is pretty taxing. But what the overall framework laid out by McG affords a powerful and promising insight into our world and us.
The “master” of the title is the right hemisphere, the side of the brain that is responsible for the big picture. The “emissary” is the left hemisphere, the side of the brain capable of digital and discrete thinking, comfortable with data and the narrowed focused attention.
In this series of posts, I hope to take certain passages and quotations that grab my attention as I make my way through the book, and see if I can provide distillations that might be both interesting and maybe even useful. I tweeted the other day that reading this book feels like getting into the source code or, as I like to say, getting to the underneath of what makes us who and what we are.
McG’s approach rests on the fact that the brain is in two basic parts or hemispheres. The bi-hemispheric structure of the brain mirrors the world itself, since it too is structured according to hemispheric differences. Contrary to the pop-psychology, low-resolution takes that preceded his work, peddled by the consultants and corporate trainers with the now-embarrassing dichotomies of reason v. feeling, rationality v. intuition, male brain v. female brain, Master attempts to account for the fact both hemispheres function concurrently and differently at the same time. He notes “it is not what each hemisphere does, but how it does it that matters.” How the right hemisphere works and how the left hemisphere works. The right hemisphere is prior, while the left hemisphere follows.
He will argue that this is crucial to understanding the imbalance of our time. The emissary—left hemisphere—has usurped the role of the master—the right. The implications are troubling, because the left hemisphere does not seem to know what it does not know.
He offers a few opening questions (in the Preface), starting from basic to complex:
Why is the brain, an organ that exists only to make connections, divided?
Why is it asymmetrical in so many measurable respects, both structures and functional, and why does its functioning seem to depend on its being asymmetrical?
Why is the major connection between the two cerebral hemispheres, the corpus callosum, getting proportionally smaller, and functionally more inhibitory, rather than larger, and functionally more inhibitory, rather than larger, and functionally more facilitatory, with evolution?
Crucially, and perhaps most daringly, McG makes an attempt to build out this framework as a metaphor to explain the world. He claims that brain science is essential in order to critique the modern world.
He offers six reasons why:
The recognition of hemispheric differences provides for the first time a way of seeing the picture of culture or society as a coherent whole. We are currently unable to see the whole of the problem because “we are currently in thrall to the left hemisphere’s view” which does not have the ability to see wholes, only discrete parts, or maps and not the true terrain.
We need to shift the paradigm from pieces to wholes. Piecemeal strategies are part of the problem, as the left hemisphere builds out fragments at the expense of the whole.
This book gives ample evidence of these limitations by showing the left hemisphere as “both literally more limited in what it can see, and less capable of understanding what it does see...and it is less aware of its own limitations. We must reassess left hemisphere dominance, despite the power it has unleashed.
The book is not just a societal critique, but aims to achieve more: to add to an understanding of brain function, and to add thereby to our understanding of our own minds; to give us a means of evaluating ways of thinking that although apparently equally rational may sometimes be in conflict. Brain science gives us a descriptive critique, a phenomenological model grounded in science of the brain.
We are becoming, as a society, more like individuals with right hemisphere deficits. We are losing our capacities to read human faces, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise.
A recurring theme of my work here in The Underneath is that something is wrong. McG is helping to build out the veracity of that intuition on my part, and will afford us a better way of addressing the meaning crisis.
If things are out of balance as many of us sense, the brain structure gives us a way of seeing a path back to re-integration.
Stay tuned.
Wonder what you think of how I use his The Matter With Things to show mainstream education's role in manufacture of autistic mindset of modern culture?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/feral-intelligence-nathalie-bethesda/?trackingId=nbOoWS1QQniV6dhHBrkN5w%3D%3D
Great overview of the macro-framework of the text: looking forward to future pieces!