Moving Homes (Not Blogs)

To my faithful and other visitors to my blog, thank you for continuing to come even though I have been very irregular lately.  At least two reasons are involved. The first is that i have been reading McGilchrist’s recent book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, and the second is that my wife and I are moving to a CCRC, that is a retirement or senior community. The move will take place in mid-July, but has been very unsettling for a while as the process of moving is horrendous after being in a big house for decades. I am both excited about and disappointed in MGilchrist’s new book. It is much more philosophical than The Master and his Emissary, raising deep questions about reality and how we perceive it, and very challenging for a non-philosopher like me. My disappointment comes in the absence of more practical understanding of how the brain works that might allow me and others to advance our work to reverse the trajectory of life on the earth these days to a path toward flourishing. The urgency of action grows every day. For folks like me, the ultimate nature of reality is merely an interesting question, but for others to ponder. The immediate problems that must be dealt with have arisen as a result of how the human brain attends to that reality right now. The same is the case for “value.” It matters little whether these concepts are “ontological primitives,” which means that they simply are, but we cannot dig any deeper to determine how they came to be. This critique is not meant to devalue the immense value and significance of McGilchrist’s continuing scholarship, but only to question how it can be applied to bring about the shift in hemispheric balance so urgently needed. If I am mistaken about the practical implications of The Matter With Things, please point out the way it can add to the power already available from the bihemispheric model in real change.