In McGilchrist’s new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, he spends a considerable number of pages discussing the relation of mental illness and other pathologies of the brain to the hemispheric balance. Schizophrenia and autism share a chapter. He provides lots of evidence that the loss of reality and related symptoms in schizophrenic subjects is due to an imbalance of the hemispheres with th left strongly dominating the right. That makes sense as the affected person is operating largely out of the disconnected hemisphere, and had limited connection to the actual… Read More
Continue ReadingBrainwashed Nation
A democratic, free nation can exist only when truth and civility abound. With neither in place, the bonds that hold the polity together shrivel and eventually disappear. The assault on the Capitol attests to that. Some level of shared truth is critical to enable the common good to emerge. Without a clear vision of that good, no collective action can be put forth and enacted by consent. The only alternative is action through force and fiat. Biden’s election will return truth to the White House, but little else. And even that will not matter so long as the body politic… Read More
Continue ReadingToo Much Wealth in the Wrong Place
The Washington Post welcomed in 2012 with this story, “World’s richest men added billions to their fortunes last year as others struggled.” A few of the stunning statistics: The pandemic has forced untold hardships onto many Americans, with tens of millions of families now reporting that they don’t have enough to eat and millions more out of work on account of layoffs and lockdowns. . . America’s wealthiest, on the other hand, had a very different kind of year: Billionaires as a class have added about $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began. And roughly one-fifth… Read More
Continue ReadingOnly Connect
The title of this post, is the epigraph of E. M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. Forster’s novel is all about relationships, internal and external. Margaret Schegel, the older of the two sisters around whom the story unfolds, becomes impassioned about the phrase, “only connect.” The phrase conveys two meanings in the novel. The first relates to two internalized, opposing forces that battle each other in an individual persona. Margaret refers to them as the beast and the monk or to the prose and the passion. The second is an imperative to make and nurture personal relationships. Forster has caught the… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Hidden Danger in Global-Warming [Quick] Fixes
The danger in focusing on such “solutions” is that insufficient attention will be paid to more deeply rooted causes. In systems-dynamics lingo, such defocusing is called shifting-the-burden (see image). This occurs when little or no attention is given to finding and addressing root causes. Root causes are those aspects in complex systems that are often found buried deep in the hierarchy of determinative relationships. I believe that this is exactly what is happening today with virtually all discussions about climate change. The argument that follows is not against applying fixes altogether, but only in conjunction with sufficiently large and comprehensive… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Election Nobody Won
I was sitting at my computer the morning after the election, not unexpectedly, awaiting the vote counting to end. It looked like Biden would be the next President. Now we know he will be, but it will be short of a victory. It will return truth to the White House, but little else. And even that will not matter much so long as the body politic has lost the basic civility on which democracy depends. Civility is at heart an acknowledgment that the burdens of governance are shared by all the people, and that requires an even more basic condition.… Read More
Continue ReadingLying, the Left-brain, and the President
As many others and I have written, the real world always wins, in the sense that no matter how much we think we are in control, outcomes result from whatever forces are at work out there. Objects will always fall down, not up, when we drop them. People will behave the way their brains tell them to, no matter how we think they should respond to our commands. Even proven scientific theories don’t work when the circumstances depart from those from which the theory was deduced. Newtonian mechanics do predict the path of a cannonball, but not how electrons in… Read More
Continue ReadingHalf-brain-dead Politics
David Brooks had an interesting oped in the NYTimes on August 7 about the state of the Republican party. The sub-headline read: “The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches.” For me, this wording is quite intriguing because I have been re-reading, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist’s book about the divided brain. His arguments about the different functions of the two brain hemispheres seem to fit the way that the Republican party and especially, Donald Trump, look out at the world and respond to it. Using McGilchrist’s model, I would say that the right-hemisphere of both Trump… Read More
Continue ReadingMcGilchrist, Meaning, the Divided Brain, and History-making
I came to realize an important error in my writing, that of the sloppy way I have been using the important word, “Meaning.” I have generally used it to apply to the whole of situations that are being attended to primarily by the left brain hemisphere. Meaning can also be applied to individual words in the sense that we know the meaning of an isolated word, such as desk, or run, or over, or fast, or slowly. The conventional use of semantics refers to the essential meaning of individual or groups of words. Merriam Webster dictionary defines semantics as: “the… Read More
Continue ReadingTo Change This Broken World, Stop and Learn How to Think About It
What can one say? Anything that is coming to mind to set down on paper seems too frail and inadequate to capture the moment. Each time I say to myself that we have hit bottom, something happens to deepen the trench we have become mired in. One thing, however, keeps cropping up. The criticality of recognizing the root causes of our various and interlinked messes. Let me pick just a few: covid-19, joblessness, racism, brutality, lies, poverty, obesity and on and on. We have all the words we need to build a wonderful nation, so the fact that it is… Read More
Continue Reading