“Welcome to Las Vegas! A
faith-based community!” The bicameral mind and
The movie playing in our head!
(I
need to begin with a confession. I haven’t been entirely successful in
banishing the preacher inside me but I’ve done my best. I apologize in advance
for those moments when exhortation swamps analysis).
The
cartoon -- a flashing high-way sign with the message, “Welcome to Las Vegas! A
faith-based community!” – expresses the fact that we all live in some sort of
“faith” community. But I’m using the
word “faith” in a very broad non-religious sense – to indicate the picture we
have of life and the world that we take for granted. I’ve used the Las Vegas cartoon as a point of
entry into the subject because Las Vegas is a place of obvious wishful-thinking
with its places of worship, seductive liturgies and opportunities for both
pleasure and penitence. Las Vegas -- a faith-based community – can be best
understood by looking at some of the literature on the bicameral mind, the
divided brain. Neuro-science is a rich field of
enquiry with many factions and divisions. It seems that for every affirmation there’s a
contradiction when it comes to the issue of consciousness. But the great thing
is that you don’t have to believe literally in this stuff for it to be
illuminating and true at some level. It might not work as science but it does
as metaphor. We are all part of a faith-based community.
The
central image I want to focus on is the feeling or fact that there’s a movie
going on in our heads, which isn’t necessarily true but is, nevertheless,
necessary for our being in the world. It’s not that we’re passive moviegoers.
We interact with it. It can change yet we’re not in control of it. One clue about the movie in your head can come
from asking yourself “Am I an Arcadian or a Utopian?”
Are you an Arcadian –
looking to an idealized past (wishing you were 30 again and Eisenhower were
president) or are you a Utopian – looking to an idealized future, where the
internet makes us all friends in one happy global family – all of us making
money and buying stuff?
This
is a good time of year to think about the movies going on inside our heads,
those stories we tell each other when we’re afraid of the dark! In fact, this time of year is like one big movie
festival. There’s the Christmas movie, the Hanukkah movie, the Winter Solstice
movie, the Kwanza movie, and the New Atheists’ Movie. Evidently in Times Square there’s a new Atheist ad? “Keep the Merry!” and “Dump the
Myth!” But if the cartoon is onto
something, you can’t get rid of myth. You can exchange it but you can’t dump
it. We’re
all caught up in some faith-based community making assumptions about life,
about what’s real and what isn’t.
There
are also the minor movies in our heads we do have some control over, depending
on our education and experiences – whatever it is in our background that
enables us to connect the dots of experience and forge (note the double
meaning) them into some kind of narrative or story. For example, I was given
recently a CD gift set of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. But
it wasn’t any old recording. There was a
date (1938) and a place (Vienna) and a conductor (Bruno Walter). Now connect
the dots of these four facts and make a story – a horrendous when you remember what
Adolf Hitler was up to at the time.
Or, think about the battling
mythologies going on in Congress at the moment! Our politics is a cacophonous mêlée of
conflicting movie plots. Whose vision of the world rings more true to you (I
won’t mention any names!)? Does America have a “manifest destiny”? Are we truly “exceptional” and, if so, what
way? The movie studios of Congress are busy churning out movies about health
care, foreign policy, entitlement reform, the role of government.
What else competes with the movie in
our head? There are mighty facts of the universe brought to us by modern
science, which give shape to the way we view the world. Last April – (reported
last month) there was the biggest cosmic explosion ever witnessed -- 3.7 billion light years away. It took that long to reach us. How does that information affect the movie
going on inside your head? Bill Bryson begins his Short History of Nearly Everything:
“Welcome. And congratulations.
I am delighted that you could make it . . . For you to be here now trillions of
drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging
manner to create you . . . For the next many years these tiny particles will
uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts
necessary to keep you in tact and let you experience the supremely agreeable
but generally under-appreciated state known as life . . ..
Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level . . . Yet, somehow
for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to
keep you you. The bad news is that the atoms are
fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting . . . Even a long human life adds
up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into
view, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, and silently
disassemble and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.”
Is that part of the movie going on in your head?
Think of the inevitable heat death
of the universe 150 billion years from now and Woody Allen’s hilarious
treatment of it in his movie Annie Hall. Given the fact that the world is going to end Alvy (who’s nine) sees
no point doing his homework!
Doctor in Brooklyn: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy's Mom: Tell Dr. Flicker.
Alvy's Mom: It's something he read.
Doctor in Brooklyn: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: [his head
still down] The universe is expanding.
Doctor in Brooklyn: The universe is expanding?
Alvy at 9: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's
expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy's Mom: What is that your business?
[she turns back to the doctor]
Alvy's Mom: He stopped doing his homework!
Alvy at 9: What's the point?
Alvy's Mom: What has the universe got to do with it? You're
here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor in Brooklyn: It won't be expanding for billions of years yet,
Alvy. And we've gotta try
to enjoy ourselves while we're here!
Alvy Singer: [addressing
the camera] There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill
mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the
food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I
know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about
life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's
all over much too quickly.”
Allen’s
pessimism runs deep. Here’s his summary of the movie going on in his head: “I
don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve
immortality by not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my
countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
Politics, cosmology, culture – all provide
the story-line and dialogue for our movie. The trouble is the cultural movie we’re all in tends to assume a mechanistic view of the universe. We
tend to take it for granted that truth becomes something proved by argument.
What current thinking about the relationship between the brain and the mind has
brought to the fore is the importance of another, (and to me) ultimately more
powerful revealer of truth, metaphor.
Iain
McGilchrist – a psychiatrist and teacher of literature
-- laments the fact that a mechanistic view of the universe has come to
dominate the movie going on in our heads. He tells us: “We need metaphor and mythos in order to understand the world.
Such myths and metaphors are not dispensable luxuries or ‘optional extras’,
still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the
process. When we are not given anything better, we revert to the metaphor or
myth of the machine. But we cannot . . . get far in understanding the world, or
in deriving values that will help us live well in it, by likening it to the
bike in the garage.”[i] The
myth of the machine leads to a smallness of vision. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
confessed: “I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe in
themselves . . . but more frequently all
things appear little . . . the universe itself – what but an immense heap
of little things?” “I can contemplate
nothing but parts.” He could also write about this love of “the Great” “the
Whole”. But is the Universe but a mass
of little things? Is the movie in
your head only something you’ve cobbled together from the rag and bone shop of
your necessarily limited experience?
McGilchrist’s book, The
Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,
is written from the perspectives of philosophy, neurology and neuropsychology. The
title is taken from a short story by Nietzsche. The Master is betrayed by his
emissary who comes to think he should be master. When it comes to the brain, the
claim is that the Right has been betrayed by the Left. The current literature
and work on the divided brain, the bi-cameral mind has a lot to teach us. McGilchrist’s thesis is that the hemispheres have
complementary but conflicting tasks to fulfill, and need to maintain a high
degree and mutual ignorance. At the same time they need to co-operate! The
entrenched prejudice is that the Left is superior to the Right. The RIGHT
hemisphere adds a bit of color to life, it’s the LEFT that does the serious business.
We’re
not talking about two different ways of thinking
about the world but two different ways of being in the world. And note, the right hemisphere is longer,
wider, and heavier than the left. There’s a clear asymmetry relating to
language (favoring the left) – so, it’s WORDS in the Left and PICTURES in the
right? But be warned – “every identifiable human activity is actually served at
some level by both hemispheres.” Yet, at the same time, there seems to be
striking differences in the information-processing abilities. McGilchrist writes,
“My
thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed
realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate
importance in bringing about a recognizably human world; and that their difference
is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the
brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to cooperate, but I believe they
are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many
aspects of contemporary Western culture.”
One
of the problems, McGilchrist warns us is “a misplaced need
for certainty.” Giving up our need for certainty? Can we do it? There’ an old
axiom: surfaces can be seen but depths
must be interpreted. “The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made.
Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put
them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and
moving, beyond our grasp.” The LEFT
hemisphere “needs certainty and needs to be right.” The RIGHT “ makes it possible to hold several ambiguous
possibilities in suspension together
without premature closure on one outcome.”
Again, “Certainty is . . . related to narrowness, as though the more
certain we become of something the less we see.”
Gilchrist
even writes of The RIGHT’S inclination towards melancholy – related to it’s being more in touch with and concerned for others. John Donne was right brained when he wrote,
“No man is an island.”. “The more we are aware of and
empathetically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves,
the more we are likely to suffer.” There’s a story about the composer Hector
Berlioz. He sobbed at musical performance – a sympathetic onlooker remarked:
‘You seem to greatly affected, monsieur. Had you not better retire for a while?”
Berlioz snapped back: “Are you under the impression that I am here to enjoy
myself?”
This
echoes Jonathan Haidt’s (in The Righteous Mind) point that we lead with the emotions – the
primacy of affect.[ii]
“The disposition towards the world comes first: any cognitions are subsequent
to and consequent on that disposition.”
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we
find. “If we assume a purely mechanical universe and take the machine as our
model, we will uncover the view that – surprise, surprise – the body, and the
brain with it, is a machine. To a man with a hammer everything begins to look
like a nail.” ‘The metaphor we choose governs what we see.”
The
Greek word – meta pherein – to
carry across a gap. “The point of a metaphor is to bring together the whole of
one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different
light.” The LEFT, on the other hand, sees metaphor as a lie – “perfect cheats”
(John Locke) a distracting ornament – “in the interests of certainty the left
prefers single meanings.” Bur we can’t get away from the ambiguous, cryptic and
open-endedness of being human. We are many layered, contradictory and
incomplete beings. This isn’t a cop out. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try as
long as we acknowledge the limits of human understanding.
Which
brings me back to the movie inside our head and how what we pay attention to enacts our relationship with the world. Attention is not
just another ‘function’ of the brain. “The
kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world
we attend to . . . Attention changes what
kind of a thing comes into being for
us: in that way it changes the world . . . And yet nothing is objectively has changed.” Take for
example the way we might talk of a mountain. “A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator,
a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to
another a dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it.
There no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of
thinking which reveals the true mountain.”
McGilchrist claims that, “How we see the world alters not
just others, but who we are. We need
to be careful what we spend our time attending to, and in what way . . .. What we attend to, and how we attend to it, changes it
and changes us.” Watch out! Bad stories are bad for you. We know that “Old people primed with negative
stereotypes of ageing can even give up with will to live.”
When
it comes to making movies ATTENTION isn’t enough. INTENTION is important. “The focused but
detached attention of the surgeon, with intent to care, may easily mimic the
focused but detached attention of the torturer, with intent to control; only
the knowledge of intention changes
the way we understand the act.” Think of the chilling attention of the
“experts” who organized the concentration camps in the Holocaust. Fritz Stangl was brilliantly efficient.
When
science brings “a focused but utterly detached attention to bear, it is merely
exercising another human faculty, that of standing back from something and
seeing it in this detached, in some important sense, denatured way. There is no reason to see that particular
way as privileged, except that it enables us to do certain things more
easily, to use things, to have power over things – the preoccupation of the
left hemisphere.” As if abstracted language and alienating vision is the proper
and only approach to truth. Creativity – making movies? – is at the heart of
being human – a means of helping us negotiate the craziness and wonder of the
world, a way of asserting significance in the face of the immensity of the
universe.
Many adolescents, let alone adults,
do not have the skill, which only creativity can bring, of being able to
negotiate the great absence at the
heart of the psyche. And, why have a benign view of the world anyway? Why choose to be benign? For example, what
comes to mind when you hear,
“Twinkle, twinkle little star”? Did you ever sing it? What did
you think about when you sang it? Do you remember how it made you feel? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum tells the story
of one of her students who responded to the question in this way. He saw a sky
beautifully blazing with stars and bands of bright color and the sight made him
look in a new way at his dog, a cocker spaniel.
“I used to look into the dog’s eyes and wonder what the dog
was really thinking and feeling. Was my dog ever sad? It pleased me to think
about my dog and the way he experienced the world. I looked him in the eyes and
knew that he loved me and was capable of feeling pleasure and pain. It then
made me think tenderly about my mom and dad and other children I knew.”[iii]
Why would
“Twinkle, twinkle little star”?” make someone think that the starry sky was
benevolent and not malevolent? Why think of your dog as loving and good rather
than devilish and cruel? Who cares whether some dog is happy or sad? There are
plenty of people who take pleasure in an animal’s pain. Martha Nussbaum assures
us that something important is going on. Attention has consequences.
“The
strange fact is that the nursery rhyme itself, like other rhymes, nourished a
tender humanity within us and stirs up in us the prospect of friendship. It
doesn’t make us think paranoid thoughts of a hateful being in the sky who’s out
to get us. It tells the child think of a star like a diamond rather than as a
missile of destruction and also not like a machine good only for production and
consumption. The nursery rhyme nourishes a generous construction of the seen.”
A
generous construction of the seen – an
imaginative charity – is the antidote to the idiocy of a totally private world
of the isolated self. Remember, we do not so much experience the world as
experience our representation of the
world. The world is no longer ‘present’ but ‘re-presented’,
a virtual world, a copy that exists in conceptual form in the mind. It’s a
movie!
And please note that I’m not advocating “belief”
as against unbelief! I am, however, asserting that we are all believers one way
or another! “Unbeliever” Nicholas
Humphrey in Soul Dust asserts that
the movie in our head is necessary but an illusion. He wonders if we need a grandiose view of our
own nature to survive? A necessary illusion – if so,
evolution has done its work – a trick played by the “illusionist” in our genes
to make us better at surviving. Humphrey, unlike McGilchrist,
believes that there’s nothing beyond materialism but it is “useful” for us to
believe so. All we can do is go to the
movies![iv]
How
to sum up and bring some of this together? The conversation needs to be
re-framed by going back to a richer understanding of language that respects
facts but acknowledges that narrative and story-telling is required to make
sense of the facts. We need stories to connect the dots. Remember my story of a
friend of mine who gave me a new CD issue of an old recording of Mahler’s Ninth
Symphony. I added three other “facts” to
this gift – the year, 1938; the place, Vienna; the conductor, Bruno Walter – a
story (not a pretty one) emerges which ties all these facts together in the
context of a terrible war and the persecution and attempted extinction of a
whole people. There’s no such thing as an isolated “fact”. You
need to connect the dots.
We
confuse “fact” with “truth” – the result is a comforting shrinkage in
understanding. What we think we understand we can control. There are those who think that the
relationship between the brain and consciousness is insoluble. Colin McGinn believes it’s
like trying to get “numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb.” It’s that kind of challenge. But this doesn’t
mean we cannot do anything. We can, at least, restore the power of metaphor in
our understanding of truth. [v]
The
intellectual challenge is expressed by Jared Lanier from Silicon Valley. In his
book You Are Not A
Gadget, he makes the simple point that
information under-represents
reality. We live in a data junk yard
and we need a new kind of “faith-based” community, which, in a never-ending
conversation, helps us enlarge our horizons, discern the facts and connect the
dots. We need both science and art: both, at their best, increase our tolerance
for ambiguity and our appreciation of wonder.
So
“Welcome to Las Vegas!”
We
can begin to give up our commitment to smallness by noticing that there are others
on the journey. The human quest isn’t a
private trip. It involves others and, in the end it comes down to the concrete
and personal. Viktor Frankl, in his account of his concentration camp
experiences, speaks of the "intensification of inner life" that came
over the prisoners, so that sunsets, remembered lines of verse, and even the
most ordinary actions of the past (taking a bus answering the telephone,
turning on the lights) become filled with beauty and longing. And scientist Timothy McDermott makes is
personal when he writes, “I had an aunt called Nellie who lived with my family
from the age of thirty, when she was almost totally disabled by a stroke, to
her death at the age of eighty-nine. No picture of the universe is adequate,
theistic or atheistic, which doesn’t give Nellie her place at its significant centre.”[vi]
Michel
de Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, wrote of his speaking with Brazilian
Indians in Rouen. He was struck how they
spoke of men as halves of one another, wondering at the sight of rich Frenchmen
gorging themselves while their ‘other halves’ starved on their doorstep.
A
coda: McGilchrist makes much of music. He quotes Nietzsche:
“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and
brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.” (Sorry for all
these words!) Steven Pinker on the other hand tells us that music is as
meaningless and self-indulgent as pornography or fatty food! I wonder what he thinks of the movies?
Welcome
to the Chit Chat Club in San Francisco! A faith-based community!
