Raging against the machine
One of our most influential thinkers tells Abigail Frymann Rouch that the ever-proliferating crises facing the world can be traced back to society’s loss of a sense of humility and an obsession with hubristic individualism.
The psychiatrist and philosopher tells our Tablet interviewer is best-known for his groundbreaking argument that the Western world view has become over-dominated by thinking associated with the brain’s left hemisphere, the side that is “detail-orientated, prefers mechanisms to living things and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity”.
This he set out in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and developed further in The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. McGilchrist is many things – philosopher, writer, retired psychiatrist and neuroscientist – but he is not usually thought of as a signposter to religious faith. Yet he is one of an increasing number of secular intellectuals who are coming to rediscover the value of Christian ideas. His recent writing has pointed to worship of the sacred or the divine (terms he prefers to “God”) as a remedy for much that is wrong with the world.
McGilchrist is due to speak on Saturday about “the triumph of the machine” at a conference at London’s Royal Institution ambitiously titled “The Future of Humanity”. He tells me that he will say that “the opposite of life is not death, the opposite of life is mechanism … We are embracing the idea that we are machine-like … in the process, we’re losing our sense of wonder, we’re losing our sense of humility, we’re becoming hubristic.” And this, he reminds me, has been “from time immemorial in all the cultures of the world the fable, the myth of how we will destroy ourselves, through hubris, as Lucifer became Satan”.
Speaking to me on Zoom from his home on the Isle of Skye, he says: “A lot of what I write about in The Matter With Things is the different ways in which we can approach truth. Two of them are very definitely science and reason [but] they have their limitations … it’s useful to use as many of these as we can together, including intuition and imagination.”
McGilchrist’s expertise in many disciplines enables him to swoop between wildly different fields with ease, pointing out the neglected links between them. He argues that another potential source of society’s self-destruction is individualism, which he links to secularisation, high levels of unhappiness and the ecological crisis. “Almost everything we’re taught … effectively, it’s about me, me, me … and we now find that we are the most miserable people that have ever lived. Surprise, surprise, we’ve cut ourselves off from the roots of fulfilment, which is oneness with nature, with the divine and with one another.” Solving ecological ills, he says, will follow when people see themselves as caretakers, not exploiters, of the natural world.
This talk of seeking oneness with nature, with the divine and with each another is familiar, though perhaps less so coming from someone who has arrived at his conclusions after a lifetime of study and reflection very largely outside theology. However, McGilchrist speaks of the sacred with ease. He tells me of attending Mass at St Francis’ Basilica in Assisi and being taken aback by “the feeling of the devotion” there. He has a soft spot for St Francis. “I’ve learned with time that more important than petition is gratitude and adoration. And he exemplifies that beautifully.” He quotes St Francis: “When you pray, you should ask for nothing, nothing.”
McGilchrist is struck by the experiences of friends who have been received into the Orthodox Church. He says they have found the “genuine, valid, uninterrupted tradition of the divine and the sacred, of worship of it, of the sense of wonder, the sense of relative humility, not triumphant exaltation, and the sense of a shared oneness that is encaptured in these ancient rituals … the purpose of worship is to be engaged with something that is essentially mysterious, but is knowable through experience.” He pauses. “What was it the author of The Cloud of Unknowing said? ‘By love, he may be captured; but by thinking, never.’”
But hasn’t McGilchrist the philosopher reached his conclusions through thinking? He laughs. “I didn’t think my way to them; it was through experience.” He reaches for a word somewhere between “thinking” and “feeling” to explain how he responds to the sacred polyphony of Tallis, Byrd and Palestrina. The only word that will work for him, he says, is “spiritually”.
Two decades ago the New Atheists, scorning religion and spiritual experience as many of the last century’s philosophers did, dominated bookshops and the airwaves. But now the likes of the historian Tom Holland and the feminist Louise Perry are pointing out the value of our Christian heritage and of Christian social teaching and morality, and former atheists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Paul Kingsnorth are among several recent high-profile conversions.
How would McGilchrist describe his beliefs? He pauses. “If you said to me, ‘Are you a Christian, Yes or No?’ I’d say ‘Yes’. I’d immediately feel how bad a Christian I am. And then I’d think, ‘Is it really right for me to call myself a Christian?’ And I know that that’s a mistake, because, as it were, the whole theme of Christianity is to forgive people their failings and shortcomings.” But he doesn’t want people to be put off what he has to say by their preconceptions about religion. “If I say ‘I’m a Christian’, people immediately, part of them, will switch off.
“What I’m definitely not is an atheist. Since the age of 13 I’ve never wavered from the idea that there is a divinity; the question is what to say about that divinity.” At 13, a mix of church services, listening to ancient texts, religious poetry and religious music and wandering through the scenic water meadows around his school, Winchester College, convinced him there was “something there that was beyond the everyday and banal”. In his late teens he wondered about becoming a monk after university, probably a Catholic one.
“And I think that the Christian mythos – a word I use without any judgement being formed on its truth or not, because mythos is a form of truth, not a form of deceit – the Christian myth seems to be by far the richest of any of the traditions that I know. It is complicated, because it brings together things that seem hard to understand: the part that’s played by suffering, even to the point of God becoming part of the suffering world, and dying with it, descending into hell, and returning to Heaven. These stories are for me fabulously important. And the way they’ve been embodied in 2,000 years of art and music and poetry and mystical writings is unsurpassed, unsurpassed. So out of these things comes for me a very great strength.”
If he were in Greece or Russia, McGilchrist told me, he would attend the Orthodox liturgy. “The fact that the current patriarch, or whatever he’s called, is in bed with Putin is really not an answer to whether the [Russian Orthodox] Church is valuable.” But he answers in the conditional, because, he laughs, though “there is an Orthodox church, I think, on Mull … but [it] would take me a day to get back”. As for anything more local, he suggests the “timbre” of Christianity in the Scottish wild would test his patience, while south of the border he has little time for Church of England vicars’ current habit of addressing falling numbers by “riding down the aisle on a motorbike”.
Does he believe the Church has become, in his language, “too left-hemisphere controlled”? He pauses. “Religion often starts from, it seems to me, the insights of a wise and holy person, but it can easily also be taken up by left-hemispheric people who say, ‘Oh, thank goodness, we now know what is good and what is wrong. And it’s all written down in a book and anybody who departs from it should be put to death’.” McGilchrist has made a similar critique of whole societies – that they begin with room for creativity, and flourish, but gradually become more grasping as they expand.
Attempts to control religion can come from without, as well as within. McGilchrist tells me of visiting a midweek service in a cathedral in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1976, in the Brezhnev era. “It was packed. And there were candles before all the icons, there was a choir singing for all they were worth, they were pouring out their souls; and there was a devout congregation there of all ages. And … outside the church there were a group of legitimised thugs in leather jackets and dark glasses, taking photographs of everybody who was going in and coming out, to make sure that those people’s children never got to university. And that was a Church that was oppressed, and, my God, was it alive!” He pauses. “I sometimes think that we can’t survive if we’re too comfortable.”
Valuing imagination as much as science and reason, stewarding rather than exploiting the Earth, experiencing worship as a place of wonder, churches remaining steadfast under pressure – McGilchrist’s rebalanced world is of costly beauty built on ideals, not lazy habits. But if we are to rediscover our humanity and the Earth its health, perhaps that is what is needed.
More details of “The Future of Humanity”, an in-person and online symposium at The Royal Institution in London on 26 October with Iain McGilchrist, Mattias Desmet and Elizabeth Oldfield: www.channelmcgilchrist.com
Abigail Frymann Rouch is a freelance writer and former online editor at The Tablet.