From The Dichotomy of the Self - my book about how the great thinkers split the person in two, and what those splits still explain. This week, the most famous split of all.
Iain McGilchrist opens The Master and His Emissary with a parable he attributes to Nietzsche, and which nobody has ever managed to locate in Nietzsche. A wise master rules a small, prosperous land. He appoints emissaries to manage what he cannot attend to himself. One of them grows confident, mistakes the master’s restraint for weakness, usurps him, and rules in his place, and the once prosperous land is ruined. That parable does more work in the book than the neuroscience does.
You already know the pop version of left brain and right brain, logic on one side and creativity on the other, and you probably know that the pop version is wrong. Scientists falsified that tidy division of labor decades ago. Both hemispheres participate in nearly everything, and most serious people filed the whole topic under debunked. McGilchrist’s starting point is that it refuses to stay filed. The brain is an organ whose entire business is making connections, and it is profoundly divided, and it has grown more divided over evolution: the corpus callosum, the bridge between the hemispheres, has shrunk relative to the hemispheres it connects. Stranger still, the bridge’s main function is not communication but inhibition, each side actively silencing the other. Nature has gone to some trouble to keep these two apart.
So the difference is not in what the hemispheres do. It is in how they attend. The left zooms in on detail, sequence, category, the focused attention that gets things done. The right zooms out to context and to what is actually there rather than what was expected. McGilchrist’s own analogy is a company run by a salesperson and an engineer, each convinced the other is freeloading off his talent.
Then the evidence gets strange. In a condition called anosognosia, patients with damage to the right hemisphere deny their own paralysis: the left arm does not move, the patient insists nothing is wrong, and invents an explanation when asked to lift it. The denial can be temporarily reversed by activating the damaged right hemisphere, and it can be induced by anesthetizing a healthy one. Insight, it turns out, leans on the right side, which fits a darker finding from elsewhere in psychology, that depressed people tend to be more realistic about themselves. It is not that insight makes you depressed. It is that the machinery of insight and the machinery of comfortable illusion are not in the same place.
McGilchrist’s thesis is the parable. The emissary has usurped the master. Modern Western culture handed power to the zoomed-in hemisphere, which is linear, systematic, confident and blind to whatever it cannot categorize, and the result is a civilization that knows exactly how to do things and never what ought to be done. We escaped the tyranny of chaos and walked into the domain of excess order. That is not the same thing as intelligence.
You can take or leave the neuroscience. I take it seriously and hold it loosely, which is roughly where the evidence leaves you. The parable survives even if the anatomy falls, and every institution you have ever watched rot did it the same way, with the means quietly usurping the ends and the measurable crowding out the important.
The Dichotomy of the Self. Paperback and Kindle.