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| Dr. Iain McGilchrist |
Because of our lack of sense of the cohesion of a dynamic whole, we end up acting in bad faith. Not for the first time, it is Erwin Chargaff who puts it most vividly:
Our time is cursed with the necessity for feeble men, masquerading as experts, to make enormously far-reaching decisions … You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life … The world is given to us on loan. We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it.Once again, the whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole. To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.
I will be explaining that the world we experience – which is the only one we can know – is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. This implies that there is no simple and single, wholly mind-independent, truth. What I did not want to appear to be saying, at any cost, was that there is no such thing as truth; or that reality is simply made up at our whim. Absolutely not.
As Kierkegaard pointed out, it can come about that the unreasonable sceptic ‘precisely out of fear of being deceived is thereby deceived.’
Insisting that the economy—global or national—would naturally work out its problems on its own was never good economics. Just as a nation could settle into equilibrium with high unemployment, so, too, could international trade slip into chronic imbalance and dysfunction. But [Joan] Robinson was writing in an obscure specialty publication for academics who had been exiled from the professional mainstream.
Commenting on positive psychology’s empirical validation of ancient moral philosophy, Deirdre McCloskey observes that it is “striking that a group of modern clinical and social psychologists, using largely Western evidence, have on the whole confirmed what ur-Westerners such as Aristotle and especially Aquinas discerned by other means: that the virtues among us Westerners (at least) are these particular seven, and that they work as a system in the best of our lives and the best of our communities.”
Media elites were just as stupefied. They were entertained and appalled by Trump, and they dismissed him as a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, an authoritarian, and a vulgar orange-haired celebrity. He was all of these. But he had a reptilian genius for intuiting the emotions of Real America—terra incognita to elites on the right and left. They were helpless to understand Trump and therefore to stop him. Trump violated conservative orthodoxy on numerous issues, including taxes and entitlements.
N.B. "Reptilian genius" really captures the phenomena, although a friend's description of grifter president as one of "low cunning" also captures my fancy. But this is not to underestimate his powers!
Rather than a family, with its involuntary intimacy, we’re like strangers who have come to do separate things together—like people at a fair. There are rides, booths, games, and freaks. There’s a bandstand, a chapel, and a strip show. Markets hawk every imaginable product, and the din of buying and selling is deafening. The crowd is a herd of individuals, but there are unwritten rules that everyone understands.
