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| Dr. Iain McGilchrist |
There is no one absolute truth about the world that results from this process, but there are certainly truths: some things we believe will be truer than others. A maximally open, patient, and attentive response to whatever-it-is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory, insensitive, or – above all – shrouded in dogma.
The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.
The point to be made for the purpose of the present discussion is that a philosophy of nature as organic must start at the opposite end to that requisite for a materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion, and the mind suffers modifications of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real. The emergent enduring pattern is the stabilisation of the emergent achievement so as to become a fact which retains its identity throughout the process.
We must observe the immediate occasion, and use reason to elicit a general description of its nature. Induction presupposes metaphysics. In other words, it rests upon an antecedent rationalism. You cannot have a rational justification for your appeal to history till your metaphysics has assured you that there is a history to appeal to; and likewise your conjectures as to the future presuppose some basis of knowledge that there is a future already subjected to some determinations. The difficulty is to make sense of either of these ideas. But unless you have done so, you have made nonsense of induction.
N.B. Whitehead is a favorite of McGilchrist.
“Jung came to understand that in this regard, we are all fragmented, and that the work of individuation is to fuse our disparate parts into a new, more competent whole; as he remarked years later “so-called normal people are very fragmentary . . . they are not complete egos.”
When the pioneers of Silicon Valley were thinking through the potential applications of the internet, they often turned to writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson for ideas. Today, no discussion of the implications of artificial intelligence is complete without at least one reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator movies, just as nearly all conversations about robotics include a mention of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or the movie it inspired, Blade Runner.
A social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, did the same and in The Righteous Mind (2012) found the typical conservative to be in better balance with life’s demands than the typical liberal. If so, we might reasonably wonder why conservatives at present can sound so angry. Perhaps the point is that conservatism is a category in politics, not social psychology.
The distinction that’s sometimes made between patriotism and nationalism is the essence of de Gaulle’s politics, as it had been in many ways of Disraeli’s. The patriot loves his place and its monarch and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it) but employs his obsessive sense of encirclement and grievance on behalf of acts of ethnic vengeance.
If defense has a clear advantage over offense, and conquest is therefore difficult, great powers will have little incentive to use force to gain power and will concentrate instead on protecting what they have. When defense has the advantage, protecting what you have should be a relatively easy task. Alternatively, if offense is easier, states will be sorely tempted to try conquering each other, and there will be a lot of war in the system.
As for the idea that a healthy diet must be mostly plants, that it must include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pulses, and legumes, we don’t have even the ambiguous 1960s-era studies to support it. We have no meaningful clinical trial evidence to support this idea, as Michael Pollan infers in In Defense of Food, the book that brought us the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” What we have instead, he notes, is the idea that people who eat a lot of plant foods tend to be healthier than people who eat the standard American diet (given the appropriate acronym SAD), that is, who eat at fast-food restaurants and buy the packaged, highly processed, sugary foods in the supermarket that Pollan aptly calls “foodlike substances,” food that health-conscious people naturally avoid.
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