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| Published in November 2021; one of my Christmas presents! |
The journey matters – because it is the arrival. This means that while, for some, every succeeding view will disclose some new aspect of an always changing landscape with which at every turn they become better acquainted, for others the landscape will appear to be, unrewardingly, always the same landscape.
Get used to reading quotes from this book; I'm just getting into it & it's excellent.
McGilchrist argues [in his book The Master & the Emissary] that since the Industrial Revolution, this power-sharing agreement has broken down, with the left brain assuming an increasingly dominant position. It was at this point that the “Emissary” usurped power from the “Master.” The situation is rather like that of the Gnostic creation myth, in which the demiurge, or craftsman, employed by the “true God” to create the world, comes to believe that it is really in control, that it is the supreme deity, and enacts a coup d’état, with disastrous consequences. The left brain likes to deal with what is familiar, with what it knows, and in modern times it has been busy turning the world around it into what it knows best: a machine.
From McGilchrist's first great work.
The old saying I learned as a child, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” is not literally true, as even a child knows; what it teaches is that we have agency in reacting to words. When someone says I am sick or sinful or shameful, I can steer myself toward feeling tedium rather than trauma.
As evolution proceeds, complexity increases. It’s a fascinating piece of data, but why is it true?
Scientists master nature in their laboratories so that engineers can build arsenals and factories, manufacturers can make arms and goods, and soldiers and merchants can dominate the lands and markets of the world.
Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that “the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
Compare with the quote above.
If the experts tell us that our modern economic and social system is systematically generating disease risk, what do we do about it?
The answer, I fear, is "not much."
Nutrition is not the same as food science. Nutrition is what happens to food between the mouth and the cell. Food science is what happens to food between the ground and the mouth.
