Meta-Crisis
= "A metacrisis is a Polycrisis with a common root (generator function) in the meta layers of our civilizational systems and worldviews". [1]
Description
0. Andrea Farias:
"The Metacrisis refers to the root cause of the multitude of crises we are facing: climate change, ecological collapse, mental health, rise of authoritarianism.
The Metacrisis is in essence a failure to create cultural and governance systems that adapt to Externalities and build social capital. When this occurs, the underlying logic of the system itself leads to negative effects as it becomes more successful, for example:
- Capitalism: the problem of capital being too free, therefore becoming disconnected from the material world, and causing harms that cannot be seen by capitalist systems, such as pollution and climate change.
- Liberalism: "through its emphasis on the protection of the individual by the state (mostly through human rights law) liberalism weakened the power of intermediate institutions and became simultaneously more individualist and statist; and by supporting the apparently free market, it has facilitated the coercive power of commerce in ways that make us less free." Source
- Democracy: too much voting can weaken a democracy and decrease citizen agency, rather than increase it.
Multipolar Traps & Zero-Sum Games are important factors in creating these negative spiral dynamics.
We struggle to question or even see the underlying assumptions, or 'meta' logic of the system, for example, instead of asking, how do we adapt our economy to make it more sustainable?, we should be asking what even is an economy? what do we mean by money?"
(https://diome.xyz/2+%F0%9F%8C%BF+Leaves/Metacrisis)
1. Mervyn Hartwig et al. :
"What distinguishes the meta-crisis from the poly-crisis is that, while the latter highlights that there are many different crises occurring simultaneously and recognizes that many of these are interconnected, the former goes a step further and uses integrative metatheoretical frameworks and distinctions to reveal the subjective as well as objective, semiotic as well as “material”, “interior” as well as “exterior” dynamics in play.
Whereas poly refers to ‘many’ crises and their objective interconnection, meta refers in addition to their higher-order unity as a complex totality or singularity that includes human construals and interventions and the possibility of a more adequate meta-view that grasps real future possibilities. Meta implies an overarching unity or identity that holds and operates on the differences in their subjective as well as objective complexity. The notion of the meta-crisis thus challenges the idea of an exclusively technological set of solutions to our global challenges. Because, in a context of generalized power (power-over) relations both construals and responses will be contested, resolution of the meta-crisis will involve among other things ‘hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles’ (R. Bhaskar, 1993/2008, pp. 62, our emphasis).
Metatheory is needed inter alia to orient and support the coordination of these struggles globally. Its meta view offers an integrated perspective of the human subject in relation to the world. Without it, we can’t even ‘see’ the poly-crisis, let alone construe it adequately or relate to it effectively; with it, new realities and leverage points for impact are highlighted. Metatheories have co-evolved or co-emerged with the metacrisis. On the one hand the metacrisis demands and in part drives the emergence of integrative metatheory. On the other hand integrative metatheories allow one to see and engage the metacrisis in its full holistic complexity. They thus present us with unprecedented opportunities for helping to effect a transition to a new sustainable form of life. They can help empower us to make it through the collective rite of passage that the metacrisis necessitates."
(https://www.academia.edu/26063515/On_the_Deep_Need_for_Integrative_Metatheory_in_the_21st_Century)
2. Jonathan Rowson:
"The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world)
Related Concepts
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"In an account of the present conjunction, Adam Tooze (2021, 6) describes a “polycrisis” of “overlapping political, economic and environmental conflagrations”. He regards this as a departure from world-market normality, but other diagnoses are possible. Alex Callinicos (2022) argues that “the new age of catastrophe” is the logical culmination of capitalism’s competitive accumulation, as a “band of hostile brothers, grabbing as a much as possible, drive humankind over the cliff”. He sees a “multidimensional crisis” with four elements: i) biological, with global warming as exhibit one, but accompanied by other symptoms, such as the zoonotic overspill of a pandemic unleashed by deforestation and commercial agriculture; ii) economic, as problems of stagnancy, inequality and financial instability that manifested in the great crash of 2008 remain unresolved; iii) geopolitical, in the struggle for global hegemony between the US and EU on one side, China and Russia on the other, with lesser powers maneuvering for position; iv) political, as the “extreme center” of globalizing neoliberalism is collapsed by populist eruption, primarily from the far-right. The war in Ukraine provides a condensed expression of these intersecting crises of economics, ecology, epidemiology, and international enmity.
Even two years ago—before the war in Ukraine, before the Covid-19 pandemic—Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2019, 50) could write of “a crisis rhetoric” spreading from the economic arena to “other areas of human and social concern” and comprehending “multiple issues of social and demographic sustainability”. They remark that “each of these predicaments has its own complex genealogy and dynamics, but their concatenation and articulation present a novel scenario“ in which “the prospect of exit from the crisis seems ever more remote as its effects continue to circulate in an uneven and syncopated manner.” However, as Mezzadra notes (2022), there can be no assumption that this leads to radical social transformation: familiar terms such as “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2008) and “the crisis state” (Negri 2005) make the point that capitalism now normalizes, manages, provokes and instrumentalizes catastrophe. Even if runaway harms escalate such that “disaster capitalism” becomes disaster-for-capitalism, the classic option of “socialism or barbarism” is today hardly reassuring (see Lilley et al. 2012) . "
(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/biocommie-power-and-catastrophe)
Typology
Secondrenaissance.net:
"Playing with different interpretations of 'meta', Rowson identifies four main patterns of the metacrisis, as a way to highlight the impossibility of pinning it down to a single meaning.
These patterns are:
- The socio-emotional meta/crisis (the crisis of 'we') – i.e., the difficulty of solving collective action problems, due to the limits of compassion and projective identification, and of not having a viable 'we' that can tackle them
- The educational metacrisis (the crisis of education) – see Zak Stein's definition below
- The epistemic meta-crisis (the crisis of understanding) – i.e., the problem of ideological and epistemic blind spots
- The spiritual meta crisis (the crisis of imagination) – i.e., being cut off from questions about the nature, meaning and purpose of life
In a similar vein, Zak Stein characterises the metacrisis as a "generalised educational crisis", which is fundamentally a crisis of the psyche – it is "in our minds and souls". He differentiates four aspects in which this manifests in how we respond to the crises and risks that are facing us:
- A sense-making crisis ("What is the case?")
- A capability crisis ("How can it be done?")
- A legitimacy crisis ("Who should do it?")
- A meaning crisis ("Why do it?")"
(https://secondrenaissance.net/publications/overview-ecosystem-names)
Characteristics
Rufus Pollock:
Surface Layer – Manifest Crises (Polycrisis)
"Concrete global crises: ecological collapse, AI risk, geopolitical instability, mental health epidemics
These are symptoms, emerging from failures in the intermediate layer, which in turn are rooted in deeper cultural-ideological and ontological substrates
Intermediate Layer – Meta-Systemic Dysfunctions (Metacrisis)
Collective action failures (e.g., climate inaction, regulatory capture)
Wisdom gap (mismatch between technological capacity and moral/epistemic maturity)
Degradation of sense-making and collective intelligence
Value misalignment and multi-polar traps (e.g., race-to-the-bottom dynamics)
Root Layer – Foundational Ideologies (Cultural Paradigms) & Deep Human Tendencies (Metacrisis)
Deep ideological features of modernity (e.g., anthropocentrism, individualism, mechanistic rationality)
Amplification of latent human tendencies (e.g., greed, fear, control)
These do not cause the polycrisis directly, but predispose systems toward fragmentation, extractivism, etc.
A metacrisis is a polycrisis with a common root (generator function) in the meta layers of our civilizational systems and worldviews. The metacrisis encompasses the bottom two layers. However, the core generators/root causes are the bottom layer: in the cultural paradigm and deep human tendencies.
Note that the polycrisis and metacrisis aren’t always well distinguished. Sometimes they are even treated as synonyms."
(https://substack.com/@rufuspollock/note/c-109276675?utm_source=feed-email-digest)
History
The Roots of the Meta-Crisis
Secondrenaissance.net:
"According to Daniel Schmachtenberger, the metacrisis is a frame for assessing the totality of risk that the world faces.2 There are thousands of (known) catastrophic and existential risks, which can only be expected to increase in likelihood and severity over the coming decades – all of which have to be prevented for our civilisation to "make it through". The metacrisis is a useful framing because it highlights the underlying patterns that give rise to these different crises and risks – providing a way to deal with them categorically, rather than trying to address each one individually. According to Schmachtenberger, coordination failures on collective action problems are the key drivers of the metacrisis. Addressing the metacrisis therefore requires fundamentally improving human coordination.
Other metacrisis thinkers locate the roots of the metacrisis deeper still. According to Jonathan Rowson, the metacrisis is an important idea because it highlights the interiority ('meta' as within) and relationality ('meta' as between) that are crucial, and often neglected, aspects of our predicament. In Rowson's framing, the metacrisis is fundamentally about our relationship to reality. He writes: "meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries."3 Addressing the metacrisis necessitates better understanding "who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally alter how we act."
(https://secondrenaissance.net/publications/overview-ecosystem-names)
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson:
1.
"The reason I think the idea of metacrisis, in particular, is worth fighting for is that it draws attention to interiority (meta as within) and relationality (meta as between) as spiritual features of what is typically assumed to be a political challenge, while also highlighting that a fixation with crisis may preclude other and better ways of being in the world (meta as beyond). What exactly ‘spiritual’ means is another essay, and I wrote a book about it, but if the term bothers you, think of it as our relationship to reality, or try this working definition. It is the belief in the real effects of the underlying, overarching, and inherent spiritual quality of the world that makes the idea of metacrisis distinct, because it suggests there is indeed an underlying cause of the world’s problems, and it is something like a multifaceted delusion: a deep and pervasive misreading of reality. The point is not that political problems have spiritual roots and therefore spiritual solutions, but that political problems arise in a cultural context with spiritual dimensions, and without attending to them we will continue to flounder."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world)
2.
"I have three main things to say about the wisdom of going meta. First, there are several meanings of meta. Second, there is epistemic skill involved in knowing when and how to go meta, and when not to. Third, we are already meta.
At its simplest, meta means after, which is why Aristotle got to metaphysics after writing about physics. It can also mean ‘with’ or ‘beyond’ but these terms can mean many things. With can mean alongside, concomitant or within. Beyond can mean transcending and including, superseding or some point in the distance. In most cases ‘meta’ serves to make some kind of implicit relationship more explicit. The ‘meta’ in ‘metamodernism’ can simply mean ‘after modernism’, but a more precise way to capture what that means is with another kind of ‘meta’: metaxy. Metaxy is about between-ness in general, and the oscillation between poles of experience in particular. Being and becoming is a metaxy, night and day is a metaxy, and modernism and postmodernism is the metaxy that characterises metamodernism; Jeremy Johnson put the point about metaxy particularly well in his feedback on this paper:
This is why I think it’s helpful to keep returning to the etymological roots, re: metaxy. Charging the word with its quicksilver, liminal nature, it approximates both the magical structure of consciousness (one point is all points), it provides a mythical image (Hermes, anyone?), it elucidates a healthy mental concept (oscillation, dialectics, paradoxical thinking), and in a back-forward archaic-integral leap, it challenges us with the processual and transparent systasis (‘from all sides’). Tasting the pickle.
One additional point on the meaning of meta is that it is invariably used as a prefix and it appears to have a chameleon nature depending on what it forms part of. The meta in metanoia is mostly beyond, as in the spiritual transformation of going beyond the current structure of the mind (nous). The meta in metamorphosis and metabolism is a kind of ‘change’, and the meta in metaphor has the composite meaning of the term because metaphor literally means ‘the bearer of meta’. The point of showing the multiple meanings of meta is not to get high on abstraction – though there is that – but to illustrate that meta need not be, and perhaps should not be, thought of principally in semantic terms as a word with its own meaning. Adding the prefix ‘meta’ introduces a shift in gear or register that can take us to several different kinds of place. It’s a manoeuvre in our language games that changes the mood and tenor of a discussion or inquiry.
As Zak Stein argues, however, there are also limits to the wisdom of going meta, which can easily become a pseudo-intelligent love of infinite regress disconnected from the pragmatic purposes of thought. Worse still, the constant availability of the meta-move creates the kind of ‘whataboutery’ that makes it difficult to create a shared world. For instance, when someone says: ‘this conversation is going nowhere’, they are going meta in a way that unilaterally ends whatever collaborative spirit of inquiry may have characterised it up to that point. To paraphrase Aristotle on anger, anyone can go meta – that is easy; what is difficult is to go meta in the right way, at the right time for the right reasons. Going meta in the wrong way can feel strenuously abstract or even absurd, but when done well, going meta should feel more like a return to sanity or a step towards freedom.
The good news is that it should not be particularly difficult to go meta in the right way because we do it all the time. Meta phenomena are more diverse and pervasive than we typically imagine – the meta world arises from our relationship with the world as sense-making and meaning-making creatures. Meta is already here with us, within us, between us, beyond us, waiting to be disclosed and appreciated. We are already meta. Learning how to learn is meta – and schools increasingly recognise the need for that. A speech about how to give a speech is meta – and people pay to hear them. Parents of young children experience meta whenever they feel tired of being tired. For a different take, if you ‘go meta’ on oranges and apples you get fruit (or seeds, or trees). If you go meta on fruit you may get to food, and if you go meta on food you may get to agriculture, and then perhaps land and climate, and then either soil and mean surface temperature, or perhaps planet and cosmos. Meta is also what happens in meditation (meta-tation!) when the mind observes itself in some way: there I go again, we think, without pausing to feel astonishment at being both observer and observed. Meta themes abound in popular culture, for instance in Seinfeld, where comedians successfully pitch for a television show in which nothing of significance ever really happened; that idea was the explicit expression of the implicit idea that made the whole series funny.[19]
The meta-move is often noteworthy because it tends to happen when normal moves exhaust themselves. For this reason, ‘going meta’ is a key feature of metamodernity, characterised by our encounter with the material and spiritual exhaustion of modernity and the limitations of postmodernity. Going meta is therefore important and necessary, and it’s already a part of popular culture, so we should not fear talking about it as if it was unacceptable jargon. But we do need to be a bit clearer about why and when we use it, not least when acting in response to ‘the meta crisis’. Since I have argued that crisis has a particular meaning relating to bifurcation and time sensitivity, and we often use the terms meta and crisis to describe our predicament as a whole, the relationship between meta and crisis deserves closer attention.
Here is how I see it. The idea of the meta-crisis is pertinent and essential, and the term offers the kind of creative tension and epistemic stretch that we are called upon to experience. However, in our social change efforts we need to remember that language is psychoactive, and it matters which terms we use to attract, persuade and galvanise people. I don’t think the aim should be to stop talking about meta as if it was a secret code we had to translate to make it more palatable. Instead, I think the aim should be to disclose that what is meta is so normal and even mundane that we don’t need to draw special attention to it.
While most developmental progress is about the subject-object move, in the case of meta-phenomena, I wonder if this is an exception that proves the rule. What we appear to need is for whatever is meta in our experience and discourse to become subject again, such that it becomes a kind of second nature that we simply ‘do’ rather than reflect on or talk about. The aim is to close the observational gap by integrating what you previously exorcised by making it object, moving from unconscious, to conscious and then not back to unconscious as such, but to dispositional and tacit. In this sense, the aim is to know the meta-crisis well enough that it ceases to be ‘meta’, and ceases to be a ‘crisis’, and frees us of the need to speak in those terms. The aim is to get back to living meaningfully and purposively with reality as we find it.
Some of the most profound and promising theorising in this space comes from those who suggest we might precipitate the new forms of perception we need by understanding the provenance of our current sense of limitation more acutely. Jeremy Johnson puts it like this:
If we wish to render transparent the true extent of the meta-crisis, to get a clear sense of how to navigate through it, then we need to thoroughly identify the foundations of the world coming undone. In order to navigate this space ‘between worlds’, we need a phenomenology of consciousness that can help us to trace, as it were, the underlying ontological ‘structures’ of the old world, the constellations of sensemaking we have relied on up until now. We should do this so that we can better recognise what the new world might be like – to re-constellate ourselves around that emergent foundation.[20]
I have endeavoured to try to do that in what follows. Once you take the idea of meta-crises seriously and start looking at them closely, it seems we are caught up in something oceanic in its depth and range, and plural. The idea of trying to define the meta-crisis as if it could be encapsulated as a single notion and conceptually conquered is a kind of trap. I have come to think it helps to distinguish between different features of an experience that ultimately amount to the same underlying process. In fact, that’s how I see the meta-crises writ large: they are the underlying processes causing us to gradually lose our bearings in the world.
There are many ways to parse the different qualities of meta-crisis, which are of course interrelated, but I have alighted on four main patterns, unpacked as ten illustrations.
The socio-emotional meta/crisis (meta as with/within; the crisis of ‘we’) concerns the subjective and intersubjective features of collective action problems relating to management of various kinds of commons, not least digital and ecological. In essence it’s the problem relating to the limits of compassion and projective identification, and of the world not having a discerning sense of what ‘we’ means in practical, problem-solving or world-creating terms.
The epistemic meta-crisis (meta as with/self-reference; the crisis of understanding) concerns ways of knowing that are ultimately self-defeating, underlying mechanisms that subvert their own logics. In essence it’s the problem of ideological and epistemic blind spots.
The educational metacrisis (meta as after/within and between; the crisis of education) concerns the emergent properties arising from all our major crises taken together, which entail learning needs at scale, particularly how to make sense of the first planetary civilisation; how to confer legitimacy transnationally; how to do what needs to be done ecologically; and how to clarify collectively what we’re living for without coercion.
The spiritual meta crisis (meta as beyond; the crisis of imagination) concerns the cultural inability or unwillingness to ‘go meta’ in the right way, for instance to think about the political spectrum rather than merely thinking with it, or for economic commentators to question the very idea of the economy or the nature of money. More profoundly, it is about being cut off from questions about the nature, meaning and purpose of life as a whole as legitimate terrain in our attempts to imagine a new kind of world."
Why is 'Going Meta', better than using 'Polycrisis' ?
Jonathan Rowson:
"Polycrisis refers to the world system of systems beginning to malfunction, with escalating risks due to emerging properties in the whole being significantly more dangerous than the sum of its parts; polycrisis was chosen by The Financial Times as the word to describe 2022, it has become a buzzword in Davos circles, and is growing in popularity among academics, philanthropists and journalists. Polycrisis already has some theoretical sophistication (see below) that will no doubt grow but I believe the term is ultimately insidious because it fetishizes complexity, and amounts to a kind of performative lamentation about the world spinning out of control.
The unit of analysis in polycrisis is the world system as a whole, which is a system of systems, with ‘system’ usually meaning a group of interrelated elements that act according to a discernible set of rules within a unified whole that usually has some kind of goal. Polycrisis typically refers to a situation in which at least three such systems are in a state of crisis, unable to function properly, and affecting other systems to which they are inextricably linked. This kind of effect was palpable during the pandemic when financial, health, and educational systems were so clearly intertwined, but it applies more broadly.
The term polycrisis was recently popularised by historian Adam Tooze, but it has an intellectual pedigree in the thought of Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern from their book Homeland Earth in 1999. There have been rigorous attempts to clarify the concept for a policy context by The Cascade Institute and more recent excellent overviews by the Post Carbon Institute (relatively empirical) and an elegant reflection by Ville Lahde in Aeon magazine (relatively philosophical). There have also been some early academic considerations in International Relations and Anthropology. In essence, polycrisis says there is a worsening geopolitical predicament confounded by the loss of intelligibility, particularly our inability to understand causal mechanisms at scale, and there is no credible conventional response in sight that is commensurate with the emergence of escalating risks to geopolitical stability.
Poly gives us a lot, but it does not give us Meta’s interiority or relationality, which is where all hope engendered by meaningful action at the level of civil society lies (action gives rise to hope, not vice versa). Poly might help us to stand back and see what is ‘out there’ in perspective, but that is not enough. Just standing back to see the big picture risks delusion, because it is a partial view pretending to be whole. Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries. (Paul Marshall’s work on New Axial Vision details this idea well.)"
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world)
The Meta-Crisis Has Both an Exterior and an Interior Dimension
David J. Temple:
"The exterior dimension of the meta-crisis is catastrophic and existential risk, the full or partial death of humanity and all future generations. This is what we referred to above as the first form of existential risk, the extinction of humanity as we know it.
This exterior dimension can be seen and touched, so it is an obvious aspect to focus on. There are major problems with human economic systems, supply chains, electrical grids, weapons with catastrophic potential, and other aspects of the built environment. These interface with the biological world in ways that result in polluted oceans, extinct species, climatological disruptions, and humanitarian catastrophes.
Planetary computational megastructures encircle the Earth. While they have their clear benefits, the sheer size, volume, and scope of these exterior systems can elicit an overwhelming, sublime terror that calls forth everything we have in response.
However, this spectacle must not distract us from the interior dimension of the meta-crisis, where the death of our humanity quietly and invisibly occurs. Through the countless thoughts and feelings of the billions whose lives and futures are being foreclosed, the interior dimensions of the meta-crisis unfold. In the fragmentation of cultures ripped apart by novel technologies, there in the immeasurable interiors of human consciousness the meta-crisis pushes the limits of what can be endured by human nature.
It is possible that we will cease to be human in all the ways we have traditionally understood and currently recognize and honor in the human experience. This is what we referred to above as the second form of existential risk, the death of our humanity as we know it."
(Source: draft review of CosmoErotic Humanism document)
How Brain Hemisphere Theory Helps us Understand the Metacrisis]]
Iain McGilchrist:
"In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved, for classical Darwinian reasons, to pay a different kind of attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me, because I had been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive ‘function’. But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance. It creates and moulds the only world we can know.
The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow-beam attention, focussed on a detail that we already know and desire, and intent on grabbing and getting, whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is on the lookout for everything else that is going on while we are manipulating: for mates, conspecifics, offspring—and predators, so as not to be eaten while eating. Its attention is broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant, and uncommitted as to what it may find: the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere. In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole, which is nothing less than the world. And context changes everything. The difference, then, is not, as used to be supposed, to do with what each hemisphere ‘does’—as though it were a machine—so much as the manner in which it does it—as though it were part of a person. The hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute: indeed, it is universally attested. And since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention, such a difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds. Hence my belief that attention is a moral act. It helps form both us and the world we come to know.
What are these two worlds like?
Very briefly, if crudely, these worlds could be characterised like this. In the case of the left hemisphere, the world is simplified in the service of manipulation: it is made of isolated, static ‘things’; things moreover that are already known, familiar, predetermined, and fixed; they are fragments, that are importantly devoid of context, disembodied, and meaningless; abstract, generic in nature, quantifiable, fungible, mechanical: ultimately bloodless and lifeless. This is indeed not so much a world as a re-presentation of a world, which means a world that is actually no longer present, but reconstructed after the fact: literally two-dimensional, schematic, theoretical. Not in fact a world at all: more like a map. Nothing wrong with a map, of course, unless you mistake it for the world. And here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control. The left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom.
In the case of the right hemisphere, by contrast, there is a world of flowing processes, not isolated things; one where nothing is simply fixed, entirely certain, exhaustively known or fully predictable, but always changing, and ultimately interconnected with everything else; where context is everything; where what exists are wholes, of which what we call the parts are an artefact of our way of attending; where what really matters is implicit; a world of uniqueness, one where quality is more important than quantity—a world that is essentially animate. Here the future is a product of realism, not denial. This is a world that is fully present, rich and complex, a world of experience, which calls for understanding; not the map at all, but the world that is mapped. The emotional timbre here is more cautious, and in general more realistic.
We need both of these ‘worlds’ to work together, but also independently: hence the need for connexion and separation. Naturally we are not aware of this disjunct, because these worlds are combined at a level below our awareness. We become aware only after an accident of nature, such as a stroke, tumour or injury; or after commissurotomy, the so-called ‘split-brain’ operation; or if one hemisphere at a time is experimentally suppressed. Then they may become suddenly, vividly, present to us. Yet, because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties, when we come to reflect self-consciously, and to rationalise about what we find, we are forced, by the requirement for consistency, to choose between the pictures of the world they offer. This is why, as AN Whitehead observed, a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself.[3] Once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse, as in our postmodern world they are, the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires. Yet almost everything that really matters to us—the beauty of nature, poetry, music, art, narrative, drama, myth, ritual, sex, love, the sense of the sacred—must remain implicit if we are not to destroy its nature. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature: we can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these all-important but hidden sources, from closeness to the long tradition of a society, to nature and to the sacred, to sophisticate our understanding. In fact we see these not as irreplaceable guides to truths deeper than those that science can encompass, but as lies. Possibly entertaining lies, but lies nonetheless. We begin to see only the self-created, self-referring world according to the left hemisphere. We go for the machine model: reductive materialism. And the consequences are all around us.
Unfortunately the two hemispheres are not equally veridical. In terms of our ability to apprehend—take hold of and use—the world, the left hemisphere is superior; but in terms of our ability to comprehend the world, the right hemisphere is superior. In each of what one might call the portals to understanding—attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence (that is, IQ), and creativity—the right hemisphere is so much superior that the left hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional. That is not a rhetorical expression: denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to the right hemisphere—and consequently dependence on the left hemisphere—than the reverse. On its own the left hemisphere confabulates, makes up stories so as to fit with its beliefs: it will frankly insist that a paralysed limb is unaffected, or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the subject at all. Unlike the right hemisphere, which sees more than one angle, and has for this reason been called by VS Ramachandran ‘the devil’s advocate’, the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right.[4] It is never wrong and never at fault: someone else is always to blame.
Furthermore, in what I take to be the four important onward paths towards truth—science, reason, intuition, and imagination—though both hemispheres contribute, the crucial part in each case, including in science and reason, is played by the right hemisphere, not the left.
Our predicament is that we now live in a world, the understanding of which is largely limited to that of the inferior left hemisphere. Some signs of this include: our inability to see the broader picture, both in space and in time; the way in which wisdom has been lost, understanding reduced to mere knowledge, and knowledge replaced by information, tokens, or representations; the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment, which are the products of experience; the divorce of mind and matter, resulting in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction and the debasement of matter to mere, lumpen matter, there for our exploitation; an exponential growth of bureaucracy and administration; everywhere the proceduralisation of life; the reduction of justice to mere equality; a loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things; the supplanting of quality by quantity; the abandonment of nuance in favour of simplistic ‘either/or’ positions; the loss of reasonableness, which is replaced by rationalisation; a complete disregard for common sense; the design of systems, not for humans, but to maximise utility; a growth of paranoia and pervasive mistrust—for if all is not under its control, the left hemisphere becomes anxious, and projects its anxiety outwards onto others. Nonetheless, we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives. In addition, I might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere: the destruction of social cohesion, and its replacement by angry warring factions. Like almost everything that used to be said about hemisphere differences the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong: the most highly lateralised emotion is anger, and it lateralises to the left hemisphere. And there are more indications, but for today’s purposes I will stop here.
In the second part of The Master and his Emissary, I traced the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern. First there is a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two hemispheres in harmony. There then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most; and soon a decline, after which the civilisation eventually crumbles under its own weight. I trace this pattern beginning in the Greek world around the sixth century BC; in the Roman world around the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; and in the modern world with the Renaissance. In each case it is apparent that the vitality and harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it overreaches itself, becomes less creative, more and more sclerotic, unimaginative, over-administered, over-hierarchical—and power-hungry. There is a coarsening of values. Where goodness, beauty, and truth had once been the guiding values, power, the need to control, holds sway."