Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy by Tom Nichols

    

Should have received more publicity on publication

                                                            

The end of democracy will come not with mobs burning the Capitol, or food riots, or juntas of national salvation, or demagogues leading the peasants to burn the castles of the rich. It will end, instead, with highly educated, technically proficient, otherwise decent men and women with families and children and mortgages and car payments who will decide that uninformed, spoiled, irascible voters simply can’t produce coherent demands other than “just get it for us,” and they will act accordingly.


This will not happen after a revolution, or a disaster, or a landmark court case—or even after a pandemic. It will happen as part of a million small decisions made every day without the input of the common citizen, as the fulfillment of an unspoken agreement between technocratic elites and the working and middle classes. Rights and participation and transparency will be shelved—as they too often were during the Cold War in the name of national security—as luxuries simply too expensive to indulge. The population will not be impoverished proles, but reasonably educated, comfortable people who have decided that “democracy” means a certain standard of living.

Nichols, Thomas M., Our Own Worst Enemy (pp. 214-215). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

As we Americans attempt to deal with the crisis of our democracy, we are blessed to have many capable individuals addressing our plight. In no particular order: Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Thomas Edsall, Francis Fukuyama, Yousha Mounk, Max Boot, Tim Miller (and others in The Bulwark crowd), Steve McIntosh, George Packer, and others whose names escape me for the moment. Suffice it to say that there are many continuing efforts to better understand our plight. 

And, oh, yes, there’s Tom Nichols. Like Applebaum and Frum, Nichols also writes for The Atlantic. And like Frum and Applebaum and several of the others, Nichols published a book about this topic in 2017, The Death of Expertise. I haven’t read that book, but I became familiar with Nichols around that time and have followed his work since then. This includes frequent contributions to The Atlantic and podcast interviews with Charlie Sykes on the Bulwark podcast. And, to my surprise, I learned that Nichols had published a book in August 2021, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (OUP).  In fact, there’s a bit of an embarrassing story about how I discovered this book, which I detail at the end here.* Suffice it to say that while a year late to the party, I’m glad that I finally arrived. In fact, it may prove to be the best “party” that I’ve attended about this topic. 

Nichols's argument is straightforward: the greatest problems facing the U.S. and other established democracies come from within, not from abroad. The electorate in the U.S. (and I’ll focus on the U.S., as Nichols does) has been chronically unhappy with elites and the course of the nation. Why is this so? Our situation (at least our material situation) is really pretty good, notwithstanding the challenging events of the first fifth of the twenty-first century: the 9/11 attacks and related events of radical Islamic terrorism; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the crash of 2008; mounting domestic terrorism; the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic crash—all these events were indeed traumatic and cost precious lives and huge amounts of treasure. But for most Americans living in August 2022, life is nevertheless quite good. Again, not to minimize the pain and death associated with the events listed (and others), but Nichols (and I) agree with former Presidents Obama’s statement that there’s never been a better time to be alive. One must acknowledge that our material well-being, as measured by the amount of stuff we have and the quality of life that we can enjoy, is beyond the dreams of even the wealthiest who lived as recently as less than a century ago.

So, what's eating at us? Nichols summarizes his answer in three words: “narcissism, anger, and resentment.”

In pursuing this line of thought, Nichols distinguishes himself from others who’ve attempted to diagnose our malaise, including popular opinion. Nichols acknowledges that elites have indeed made mistakes, but then they always do, and the magnitude of those mistakes doesn’t justify the magnitude of the malaise claimed by so many.

To arrive at his diagnosis, Nichols, instead of using a searchlight, uses a mirror. 

Among the unholy triumvirate of narcissism, anger, and resentment, the anger (and resulting grievance) aspect has received the most attention from many commentators. This line of thought goes a long way in explaining the reactions of those who've suffered direct hits to their well-being by way of job losses and declining communities. Many of these losses are rightly attributable to jobs going overseas and to automation (the latter, I think, being the more significant problem regarding jobs). But the number of Trumpists and sympathizers who have suffered these severe losses is rather small. A full explanation of the approximately 40% of the U.S. electorate who vote for Trumpists requires a deeper, more sweeping explanation. 

Of course, anyone who knows much about American politics knows that most citizens, including most voters, are shockingly ill-informed about candidates, policies, and how our political institutions function. It’s a fool’s errand to place an articulated, rational set of reasons for the outcome of any election. It’s most often like trying to draw a detailed picture using just black and white (Yes or No? Candidate A or B?) and beginning the picture from a Rorschach ink blob. Nichols illustrates the problems with a couple of tales from my native Iowa: 

The Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce, for example, spoke to a woman who caucused for Sanders in 2016 and then voted for Trump. In 2020, she initially settled on Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as her choice. If Buttigieg didn’t win the nomination, however, she would move from the young, progressive, gay, once-married Buttigieg back to the elderly, right-wing, serially adulterous, thrice-married bigot Trump—a kaleidoscopic change in preferences that only makes sense as a search for a tailored set of narrow promises that would meet her personal satisfaction, rather than the selection of a candidate who must govern across a range of issues. Location 1306)

. . . . 

Another Iowan told the media that she had voted both for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump, “just to shake up Washington, to be honest.” (This is sometimes called the “OOT” voter, the person who voted Obama-Obama-Trump in 2008, 2012, and 2016, respectively.) Had Trump not been available in 2016, she said, she might have gone for—of course—Bernie Sanders. “We’ve just been in a rut so long,” she sighed. (Location 1311)

Even as a native and resident of Iowa most of my life (and as a long-time observer of its politics), this makes my head spin. I migrated from Booker to Buttigieg to Biden (I do like those Bs, I guess), but jump to Trump? How can any mind make that leap? But then it wasn’t the mind so much as the emotions that motivated these voters. 

Narcissism and resentment (and its manifestation on steroids, ressentiment—thank you, Nietzsche) both reach beyond the surface rationalizations and reasons to reveal the motivating emotional core. I suspect that social scientists tend to shy away from such broad and amorphous concepts that can’t be easily quantified, but happily, Nichols (a Ph.D. in political science and retired college professor) doesn’t shy away from these depths. 

In his discussion of narcissism, Nichols draws on the work of American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. Lasch was active roughly from the 1960s until his death in 1994, and he’s perhaps most remembered for his 1970 work, The Culture of Narcissism. Nichols cites this work and others in his review of contemporary manifestations of narcissism. One wonders what Lasch would make of our situation today. (N.B. Nichols, like me and others, believes Lasch went too far in his criticisms near the end of his career.) Related to narcissism, Nichols draws on the work of political scientist Edward Banfield to note that when the chips are down, individuals often hunker down into the confines of family rather than seeking out and pursuing the common good. Banfield saw this phenomenon demonstrated in a poor Italian village in the 1950s; Nichols sees this increasingly in contemporary America. Nichols quotes Hannah Arendt to capture the implications of the two different potentials exhibited here: 

The idiot is one who lives only in his own household and is concerned only with his own life and its necessities. The truly free state, then—one that not only respects certain liberties but is genuinely free—is a state in which no one is, in this sense, an idiot: that is, a state in which everyone takes part in one way or another in what is common. (Location 974)

But while there’s plenty of evidence in support of the anger-grievance and narcissism aspect of our current malaise, it’s the resentment aspect that may manifest the most potent motivating and explanatory power to our current malaise. Let me introduce this topic with an extended quote from Nichols: 

Resentment in politics is the externalization of envy. If there is one thing authoritarian governments do especially well, it is the way in which they mobilize resentment as a weapon. Democracy, on principle, is based on the public’s acceptance of regular cycles in which winners and losers exchange places, sometimes unexpectedly. Authoritarians, by contrast, promise stability and equality. They offer placidity by promising, without favor or exception, to make losers of everyone outside of the ruling group. By reducing all citizens to the same miserable condition, they build a constituency among those who are willing to endure oppression as long as the people they hate have to endure it as well. Resentment is about leveling rather than leadership, about vengeance rather than virtue.

(Location 1733)

. . . . 

Resentment, like narcissism, undermines the civic virtues of tolerance, cooperation, and equal justice, because it fuels demands for rewards and punishments based on jealousy and unhappiness rather than reason or impartial justice.

(Location 1739)

And if you thought that mere garden variety resentment seems quite enough to invade and perhaps destroy the garden of democracy, then there’s resentment on steroids: ressentiment.

Again, Nichols provides an informative overview:

There is a more evocative word, ressentiment (imported from French by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), that captures this vague but powerful envy of others. Mere “envy” or “resentment” isn’t enough to express the lasting toxicity of ressentiment. As the writer Joseph Epstein has explained, ordinary resentment is a “quick, stabbing thing, set off by an act of ingratitude or injustice, but that can, fairly quickly, melt away.” But ressentiment is of greater endurance, has a way of insinuating itself into personality, becoming a permanent part of one’s character. Ressentiment, then, is a state of mind, one that leaves those it possesses with a general feeling of grudgingness toward life. . . . So much so that those suffering ressentiment come almost to enjoy the occasions for criticism that their outlook allows them.

(Location 1741)

. . . . 

...philosopher Ian Buchanan describes ressentiment as a “vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have.”

(Location 1754)

. . . . 

...in the words of the German philosopher Max Scheler, it is existential envy “directed against the other person’s very nature,” and thus unresolvable: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.”

(Location 1758)

And if the citations to Nietzsche, Epstein, Buchanan, and Scheler seem too highbrow, here Nichols provides the comment of an American voter as an exemplar: 

[A]more prosaic example of this kind of resentment in modern America is the voter in Florida who was furloughed from her public sector job during a 2019 budget impasse between the White House and Congress. Initially a supporter of President Trump, she turned on her candidate in helpless anger. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting” (emphasis added).

(Location 1801)

After addressing the issue of resentment, Nichols touches on nostalgia, the tendency to idealize and attempt to recover an imagined past. The answer to malaise becomes time-travel; escape to the past when things were “better.” But time travel isn’t an option, time’s arrow flies only in one direction. And even if some aspects of the past were in some measure “better,” they can only be re-created, not re-captured. 

Nichols also notes that democracy and liberalism often prove boring. There’s no Le Mis celebrating the endless wrangling of a congress, legislature, or city council. The flag waving and drama of January 6 proved dramatic, even cinematic, but was not democracy, not the rule of law, and not a future that any sane person would want. Again, reason takes a backseat to the emotional engines that prompt some form of salvation through mindless acts expressing inarticulate dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Fascism, anyone?)

This work of Nichols is the most convincing, comprehensive assessment of our current democratic dis-ease that I’ve read to date (although there are many works out there on this topic that I haven’t yet gotten to). Nichols has the analytical mind of a political scientist that he combines with a keen, appreciative eye for the contemporary American scene. He reports coming from a modest background, and while he’s critical of his fellow Americans, he’s not dismissive or despairing of them. He wants us, our nation, to succeed, but he realizes the realities of our (largely) self-imposed self-destructive traits. Nichols has no magic wand, no simple answers; I imagine he hopes, like an experienced physician, that the first step forward in alleviating the malady is to properly identify it. 

There are many aspects of the book that I haven’t addressed here, and there are some avenues that I would like to have seen Nichols explore (for instance, the work of Rene Girard, whose insights about rivalry, memetic desire, envy, jealousy, resentment, and scapegoating, seem to me to be likely quite applicable who what Nichols is exploring. (But in fairness, I’ve only dipped into Girard to date, although I’m planning a deep dive. But we can’t know everything all at once.) Perhaps it’s best to close with a couple of more brief quotes from Nichols: 

Can we regain this Athenian sense of honor, civic pride, love of community, self-sacrifice, and deep confidence in our way of life? Or are these virtues now to be lost in a dark sea of grievance, resentment, and envy? (Location 3414)
. . . .  

“It cannot come from abroad,” Lincoln warned. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” (Location 3425)

 

*And now for my big faux pas: Nichols posted a thread on resentment in contemporary American politics. I "liked" the threat and suggested that he write up his perspective in an Atlantic article. His reply:  "(said much more in a book)" My humble pie response to that revelation was "My bad! I've now obtained a copy of OUR OWN WORST ENEMY & will seek to rectify my ignorance. Appreciate very much your commentary & analysis." I hope that this review has in some manner rectified my having missed the boat earlier!

Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century by Joshua L. Cherniss

 

2021 publication

Every once in a while we stumble into a book that seems tailor-made for the occasion. Over the Christmas holiday, I bought this book, having recently read a favorable review of it. (I don't recall where, alas.) And given that my reading list remains backed up for years (and I fear well beyond any reasonable hope of clearing in my lifetime), I could have chosen to start any number of worthy books. But  I chose this one. Why? I can't say for sure, but in looking back, I believe that the invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime, along with the continuing threat of Trump and his ilk, played a role. But by whatever prompt, I'm very pleased that I selected and read this book. It is, as I referenced above, tailor-made for the times. 

I also selected this book because I recognized the names of those whose thought it explores: Max Weber, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin, along with many other figures discussed or cited in this book.  I sometimes rue that education--my education-- was wasted on my callow youth, but--take heart teachers--sometimes planting a seed, even if it takes decades to fully bloom, brings about the desired blossom. Professor and instructors in the departments of History and Political Science introduced me to all of these thinkers, if not by direct assignment, then by reference. Indeed, the subtitle of this book refers to “dark times,” a term deployed by one of their peers, Hannah Arendt, which, along with the idea of a “time of troubles” were introduced to me as a student. When I think back, the 70s were not an easy time. American politics had to deal with the social and political turmoil of the 60s and the continuing competition between the liberal democratic regimes and the Marxist camps. Also, we experienced Watergate, the Vietnam War, and continuing forms of political unrest through much of the world. And the totalitarian threat remained real. Stalin had only died the year of my birth, while Mao still ruled in China. Thus, the thinker-actors considered in this book were all still quite topical in the 1970s. 

In addition to a thorough and considered examination of the legacy of these thinkers, Cherniss deploys a vocabulary that resonated deeply with me. Ethos, ethics, stance, posture, dirty hands, ruthlessness, and other such terms were prominent in the final political theory course I took as an undergraduate. (Hat tip to Professor (then Instructor) John S. Nelson for this class.) From where I am now, and in accord with Cherniss's argument, I find that these terms, these concerns, this mode of addressing the world of politics, goes to the very heart of the political enterprise. Not that laws, institutions, policies, and such don't count. They do. However, politics is a very human endeavor marked by speech and thus persuasion. Violence, the negation of politics, always lurks in the background, and one must understand that war (violence) isn't the continuation of politics by other means, but the cessation of politics, which comes about when politics fails. Thus, political leaders must contend not only with the plurality of views and words, but they must deal with violence or the threat of violence. There are, of course, political leaders, who, like Mao, believe political power emanates from the barrel of a gun. And some who wield the power of government believe that the utopian ends often justify ruthless means. This “realism” led to some of the greatest atrocities known to humankind. Terms like “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” seem too sterile when addressing the horror perpetrated by individuals and regimes in the twentieth century, but we must start somewhere. 

In brief, all of these individuals opposed ruthless individuals and regimes and those who claimed to be only “realistic” and were excessively “Machiavellian.” (Poor Niccolò, I think, gets a bum rap with this usage, but the usage remains as if written in stone into our political vocabulary.). Cherniss provides detailed expositions of the thought of Camus, Aron, Niebuhr, and Berlin. (The consideration of Weber is less detailed, and Cherniss includes Gyorgy Lukacs as a foil to Weber's outlook.) Cherniss dubs these five thinkers, and others of their perspective, as “tempered liberals.” (With some hesitation expressed about Weber's bona fides as a liberal.) That is, these thinkers attempt to walk the tightrope between naïveté and excessive “realism” and “Machiavellianism.” They do so by attention to persons and situations, and they recognize the reality of competing values and goods. They tend to particular observations and appraisals, and they shy away from systems of thought and purely logical conclusions. They tend to write essays instead of tomes. They work to avoid suffering while recognizing that sacrifices often prove necessary. As one reads about each of these figures, one can see from our current position that they didn't always get things right (to the extent that we can identify what's right). But overall, they provided markers against which political actions could be appropriately judged. 

I should note that Weber's distinction between the “ethic of ultimate ends” and the “ethics of responsibility” is an insight and a guide that has been with me for a long time. And I never seem to go very long without thinking about the hard decisions political officials must make, such as whether to take half a loaf or none in regard to some legislation. Or whether to rest with some evil for the sake of peace or decide that some good merits the sacrifice of lives. So also with the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the thinker amongst these five of whom I've read the most and the deepest. Like Weber and the others, Niebuhr walks a tightrope between realism (which include a theological position grounded in original sin) and the need for justice. And while Weber and Niebuhr have provided the greatest influence on my thinking from amongst these five, Cherniss's work prompts me to want to explore Camus, Aron, and Berlin in more depth. I realize that as much as I appreciate and admire Cherniss's summary and exploration of their work, his exposition points to the depth of what he's exploring. He allows me to see that there's much more in each of these thinkers than what he can share in a chapter. 

Finally, I asked myself: “Is this a work of history or of political theory?” The answer, I suggest, is that it's both. And that is as it should be. All political thought of lasting interest arises from the politics of the age in which it is produced. To understand concerns with ethos, ethics, dirty hands, stances, and the like is to be of a time. As throughout the parade of human life, we live in a world that is at once unique in the fleeting now and yet that follows paths laid down by generations before us. History provides a rough guide, but only a rough guide, a map of the terrain without the details. Thus, history provides a path to self-knowledge, both collectively and individually, but it doesn't provide a running commentary. We have to explore the sites on our own. And while history doesn't repeat itself, it does rhyme. (I know this is an old chestnut, a cliché, but it harbors too much truth to ignore.) Thus, while we are not repeating the 1930s, we can certainly discern its echoes as a land hungry dictator marches his armies without justification into a neighboring nation in Eastern Europe. And in the wider world, democracy and liberalism have been under attack and have seemed to wane. Even in the U.S., where fascist-style populism and authoritarianism threatened but was turned aside during the Great Depression, has recently experienced fascist-style populism allowed demagogue and wanna-be authoritarian to gain the presidency. And even as I write this little man (intellectually, morally) leads polls for the presidency despite the continuing revelation of his overtly criminal activities. So, yes, “tempered liberalism” is needed once again. We can't simply repeat the thoughts of these exemplars, but we can gain a great deal of wisdom and insight from their work, and we can hope that Joshua Cherniss continues to guide us in our quest. 

N.B. This book receives the highest ratings from me on Goodreads and Amazon (and anywhere else I could say so.) 

Thoughts 11 Feb. 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The hemispheres are massively more intraconnected within themselves than they are connected to one another. So, as in life, science needs both narrow focus and broad vision.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

This book is about what goes on at a higher level than that of intrahemispheric regions alone – though a very significant intrahemispheric distinction that will emerge regards the inhibitory effect of the frontal region of each hemisphere on its own posterior cortex. Nonetheless, this should not be thought of in purely antagonistic terms, but in dialectical terms, whereby something new is brought about through their joint action.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[T]oday’s world population of 7.6 billion is far too large to be supported by the flow of solar energy, so a benign future depends upon a radical reduction in numbers. In addition, agrarian civilizations are no paradise.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Jean-Jacques Rousseau pinpointed the fundamental contradiction of a life devoted to consumption by saying, ”For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The disaster [Chernobyl] had both active and latent causes, some of which were undoubtedly of a uniquely Soviet nature. The reactor’s operators took excessive risks in a way that exemplified the “We can do it no matter what” mentality instilled by Soviet propaganda since 1917, and especially in the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras, the formative years of the key actors. The design flaws of the reactor itself, and the operators’ unawareness of its potential instability, were also consequences of the peculiar political economy of the planned economy. Yet in some respects, as we shall see, Chernobyl could have happened anywhere.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Too much chaos doesn’t lead to higher order, just more chaos and disorder.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.

Thoughts 11 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We are hurtling toward a day of ecological reckoning. We should have acted many years ago to contain the damage and build a bridge to a different kind of civilization. Now we are faced with an increased population, worse pollution, dwindling resources, progressive biological destruction, much greater complexity, compounding debt, and enormous inertia in the system—a nexus of problems that have no separate solutions, only an aggregate solution requiring a total revolution in our way of life.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As generals have learned, even the best war plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, but having planned is essential, because it forces you to imagine different scenarios and to prepare for the worst. In other words, planning is an inoculation against stupefaction and panic, so when things do not go according to plan, you are less likely to lose your head and quicker to make the necessary adjustments.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Gibbon: it was “the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour,” not the barbarian invasions, that doomed the [Roman] empire of the West.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I frequently emphasise that both hemispheres are involved in absolutely everything we do. It cannot, however, be an argument against hemisphere differences.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

[James] Fowler’s work examines religion, in the broadest sense of that complex term, as the way in which we think about and relate to the ultimate nature of existence. Under that definition, even many forms of modern atheism and naturalism are really better classified as modernist forms of religious expression (Stage Four in Fowler’s construction). After all, they often represent strong conclusions about the ultimate nature of being upon which whole systems of cultural rules, norms, and ethics are constructed.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

It will be a long time before we know whether the protests of 2020 can come anywhere close to fulfilling their ambitions—not just to change policing and criminal justice in America, but also to bring full equality to Black Americans. Because structures of oppression are much too big for any one of us to budge, in a sense white people are, as usual, off the hook. Systemic criticism produces gestural politics. During the pandemic the San Francisco Board of Education took on the project of changing the names of Abraham Lincoln High School, Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, and dozens of other “problematically” named schools, while keeping isolated and demoralized children out of all schools, whatever their names. Mastheads and tables of contents changed, pictures and statues were taken down, glass ceilings shattered, but no one honestly expected to do much about the material conditions of misery.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Before Montesquieu’s discovery, the only principle of change connected with forms of government was change for the worse, the perversion that would transform an aristocracy (the government of the best) into an oligarchy (the government of a clique for the interest of the clique), or overturn a democracy that had degenerated into ochlocracy (mob rule) into tyranny.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.

The Great Leveler

Walter Scheidel

Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.

Thoughts 27 Jan. 2022

 

Ram Dass (1931-2019)

“One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.”
— Ram Dass

Compare this with what McGilchrist argues in his books. 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I aimed to dispel the unscientific fiction, popular at the time, that there was no significant difference between the hemispheres. This misconception was just as popular, and just as absurd, as any of the myths about supposed differences that were, and for all I know still are, being peddled in management seminars, and to which it was a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, as anyone who has worked with neurological and psychiatric patients knows, there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds. The question was not whether there was a difference – that was clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt – but why there was, and of what kind it might be.

My argument was, and is, that the nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The character and sheer extent of that difference, as well as its significance for the future of our civilisation, formed the subject of that book. And that difference could be seen as rooted in a difference in attention . . . .

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Science is now used to many fine ends; but, alas, inevitably much of the time in the service of the subjugation and destruction of Nature.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Some journalists, especially younger ones, ridicule the idea of objectivity as a “view from nowhere” and call for replacing it with “moral clarity,” by which they seem to mean their own political values.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

His populism brought the cynical cruelty of Jersey Shore to national politics. The goal of his speeches was not to whip up mass hysteria but to get rid of shame. He leveled everyone down together.

N.B. I didn't to back to the book to attempt to ID who the "his" in "His populism" is because we all know, don't we?

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

Biologist David Sloan Wilson captures this concern in his Evolution for Everyone, in which he describes how a young graduate attempting to apply the insights of evolutionary theory to other fields ran into a wall of opposition based on many of these negative presumptions when he tried to discuss his newfound interest with his professors and peers: [He] quickly learned that when [he] spoke of human behavior, psychology and culture in evolutionary terms, their minds churned through an instant and unconscious process of translation, and they heard “Hitler”, “Galton,” “Spencer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamentalism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom’s conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quarn that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the “beginner” to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—creatio ex nihilo—abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as “thinking the unthinkable.”

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes.