Our whole culture has been skewed by a belief that we have achieved a kind of wisdom which never existed in the past; and it’s just something we’ve invented in the last few decades. It’s a quite irrational position to take.
“We have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality” writes Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.
A follow up to the landmark The Master And His Emissary, the book is the noted scholar’s attempt to “convey a way of looking at the world, quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years.” Not only have we misunderstood the nature of reality, argues McGilchrist, we have, to our detriment, “chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case.” We urgently need to “transform both how we think of the world, and what we make of ourselves”, he concluded.
Psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar, Dr McGilchrist is a rare breed – a highly sophisticated, often intellectually-trying luminary who succeeded in penetrating the very heart of mainstream culture. Among his correspondents are fellow neurologists, as well as “a laboratory cleaner and a long distance lorry driver in Australia” – a telling testimony to his uncannily wide reach.
I ask McGilchrist about his stark warning to ‘truth compromising’ academia, the pivotal importance of context, the fundamental difference between mother and fathers’ style of parenting, our dependance on trust, why the right hemisphere “is the more important of the two”, the negative impact of distancing ourselves from nature, how tradition enables growth, spirituality and standing up for things that matter.
HG You managed to do something quite remarkable – be highly visible within mainstream media. This is quite astonishing because what you talk about is so complex and ‘high brow’.
IM Yes, for some reason it speaks to everybody. So amongst my correspondents I have obviously neurologists, psychologists and philosophers; but I also have politicians, a cleaner in Oxford and a long distance lorry driver in Australia, so I seem to be saying something that gets through to just about everyone.
HG I interviewed Paul Taylor who left academia highly disgruntled, frustrated by the fact that students weren’t reading, they were not reading anything longer than a certain number of words.
IM It’s not just in certain faculties, this seems to be across the board. I’m told that even in English literature courses at University, the lecturers’ expectations are much more limited than they used to be, that people will not have the patience to read through a long novel or something of that kind.
HG Your name came up with regards to the standards within academia – it’s not just the fact that they only focus on one topic in isolation, it’s the actual standard of what is expected of students, the level of research is often below standard.
IM I think there are several things happening in universities. One is the decline in attention span and the capacity for sustaining attention; another is that standards have become much lower – and there are several things involved in that. Children leave school and arrive at university now unprepared for the standards they would have been expected to meet in the past, so that lecturers report that they have to go back to doing school work with their students. By the time they’ve got their degree, they’re not far above the level they might have been expected to reach when they left school before. I think there’s another aspect. In the past you would expect a person to study their special subject within the context of a general education, so that they wouldn’t just be studying it in a vacuum; they would be seeing it in terms of other things that they had learned about, and were able to relate it to. That is less usual now.
And then you have what are often called ‘grievance’ study courses, in other words, courses that are effectively looking at whatever the subject is through the simple lens of an issue about race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.
Recently I gave a lecture in Oxford entitled Dominus Illuminatio Mea. Dominus Illuminatio Mea (‘God is my light’)is the motto of Oxford University. I argued that universities are now in a very dangerous place because they’ve accepted a weakening of the idea of any kind of truth. The problem started, I think, around the time that I was an undergraduate. The prevalent theories then were Marxism and deconstructionism. What this meant was that in the area I was studying at the time – literature – people avoided responding to the unique work of art, and instead subjected it to an ideological interrogation.
In the case of deconstructionism, they held that the author’s intention was not important; there was no way of discriminating between whatever you thought it meant and falsehood. The process began there, but it has now moved on to a host of grievance studies courses in the humanities. And now, unbelievably, even in science it is beginning to be accepted that work that produces undeniably scientifically robust conclusions will not be published if it is not in line with the current cultural narrative. Those who pursue such researchwill be punished; they will be excluded and will not be promoted. They won’t get funding and their work, however robust, will be called pseudoscience. ‘Pseudoscience’:that’s a little kick that can be given to anything that you don’t like. But very weak science, science that is poorly evidenced and not replicated, will be accepted as long as it confirms whatever is the current narrative. The point here is that instead of looking for truth, we are looking for confirmation of the biases we already have, whereas the whole point of education is to enable you to see beyond the preoccupations you have, and to be able to understand a bigger picture, both in time and in space.
We have lost any sense of our history now. If children have any teaching in history, it tends to be doctrinaire, suggesting that we now know much better than people in the past who had ‘all these silly ideas’. In reality there is wisdom there that has been lost, and with it an ability to see whatever it is we’re looking at in the broadest possible context.
HG We’re filming a documentary with Dr Warren Farrell at the moment. I came across a study that really troubled me, the result of which was the bold statement that growing up in a single parent household does not negatively affect children. I’ve been speaking with Dr Farrell now for over two years, and he’s been studying dad-deprivation for several decades; and he still has questions to ask. But someone comes along and asks a few children a few questions; and on that basis people now read the ‘science now confirms that children do not need fathers’ headline.
IM This is multiplied many times over in the way the media treats stories and the way these things pass into popular culture. So there may be one study that produces different findings from others that have been constantly replicated;but, as long as it confirms what people currently want to hear, then that will become the study that is generallyreferred to, and the mass of evidence that contradicts it is simply ignored.
HG According to Warren, the telomeres of dad-deprived boys are shorter than those of boys with dads, meaning that they will have a shorter life. Did I understand this correctly?
IM First of all, yes, these things are true; but in a way they’re proxies for something that’s more important and real, which is capacity to endure stress.
The telomere is an area at the end of a chromosome like a cap that protects the ends of the chromosome from being misread as broken sequences. So these caps have a purpose. But they get shorter or eroded with age, and that’s quite normal; and when they become very far eroded,then the cell stops reproducing. You can reverse this,because there is an enzyme called telomerase which will renew growth. However it’s found in cancer cells, which is why cancer cells go on and on replicating; whereas the body knows that its own cells, its properly functioning cells,need to stop replicating at a certain point. So, to cut a long story short, what this tells us is that children, and particularly boys, who have an absent father (there are many possible factors, but this is one of them) are more stressed, and more susceptible to stress injuries. As they grow older, they show themselves to be less capable of dealing with difficult situations: they don’t know how to confront them, or how to get over them. Instead they may manifest a kind of recklessness, or violent behavior, as a cover for their feelings of vulnerability.
Incidentally, it’s not just in the teens that fathers are important. We are biological beings, and sex is not just something we make up: in the first year of life a baby needs its mother. This offends women who have decided that their career is more important and therefore have given up spending time with the child: nonetheless it is a fact. The future of humanity depends on having children that are brought up so that they will be stable functioning adults, otherwise our civilisation is doomed; and women play an absolutely central role here, women are the key to theability of a growing child to grow into a functioning adult.
We know that babies prefer their mother to any other woman, but they certainly prefer women to men in the first year of life. During that period the mother and child have to negotiate a separation. When the infant is born, and for the first few months, it can’t separate itself from the mother, it sees itself as fused with the mother; but as it learns, it sees that actually there is a separation and the mother’s role is to negotiate that separation in such a way that the child doesn’t feel threatened, doesn’t feel in any way abandoned, and knows that the solid love of the mother is still there, while nonetheless the child is an independent person. Thatis negotiated in the first year of life.
In the second year of life the dad does become very important, because toddlers, as they develop, start being rebellious, start saying ‘no’; they start wanting to do their own thing. This is all important and normal; but they need to have a father who sets boundaries. Fathers are generallybetter at setting boundaries in a way that the child will understand; it’s very difficult for the mother to be both this nurturing being and the boundary setter. It can be done,but it’s difficult. Men are designed, as it were, to be the ones that keep things in order. This is one of the problems for fatherless children, boys especially.
But for children – particularly boys – nowadays, there are just so many problems to negotiate. Everything in our culture now tells males that there’s something wrong with them, there’s so-called toxic masculinity; and of course I don’t disagree that there can be a kind of inappropriate exaggeration of certain male qualities, but that doesn’t make the male qualities in themselves a bad thing. Boys and girls need to learn different ways of being, and this is the dance of life, this is part of the joy of life.
When I look back at my life – I’m 70 now – the generation that seemed to me in the end to have negotiated the happiest marriages is the generation that are now dying out. I’m not saying that everything in their lives was right or it was all better in the past, or anything like that; but somehow they were capable of negotiating so that each had their role, each had their foibles, each respected the other, and this worked. But nowadays we’re intolerant of anything other than a sort of a dream, which is that this other person will fulfil all my fantasies, all my needs and so on; and life is just not like that! So being told to seek self-gratification is probably the worst possible advice that could be given, though it’s the advice that is propagated amongst many in our culture.
HG Warren says that any virtue taken to an extreme becomes a vice – he says it with regards to feminism.
IM I agree. This is a very basic point and a very important one. Something looks good in one context and is indeed needed, but more and more of it is not necessarily better. It reaches a certain point, but after this you approach another extreme; ironically sometimes that extreme brings you back to the very place you were trying to get away from. For example, some freedom, a certain kind of calibrated, disciplined freedom, is hugely important; but taking all the rules and boundaries in a society away produces chaos – and the end of chaos is tyranny. So it is that into the vacuum created by chaos comes a truly toxic regime that will restore order: and people will embrace it because they’ve lost everything through the erosion of a proper balance between responsibility and freedom, between privileges and duties.
HG So true. When you talked to Jordan Peterson about anorexia I believe, you touched on OCD – how certain things that go wrong within our behaviour and society at large can be attributed to certain things within the brain function going wrong – something within the brain does not function the way it should do and this alters our view?
IM I have written at least a couple of books about the brain and culture, but the point I’m careful to make is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the brain and culture. It would be a mistake to think that I say that the brain is the driver, or the cause of anything here. What happens is that when a culture changes it has an impact on the way we use our brains; and the way in which we use our brains in turn has an impact on the culture. So you can get into a vicious circle, a positive feedback loop, in which a change will not help correct, but on the contrary will help intensify, thecurrent tendency.
For example, I believe that, over the period from about 600 BC to the present day, Western culture has three times repeated a certain pattern. In The Master And His EmissaryI suggest that this pattern was followed by both the Greek and Roman civilisations until their final collapse. This pattern begins in a marvelously productive, harmoniouscollaboration of both hemispheres, drawing on their particular strengths; but gradually and ineluctably it becomes more and more dominated by the left hemisphere’s take on the world, at which point it is only a matter of time before the civilisation falls to ruin. In our modern world at the outset, in the Renaissance, there was a wonderful working together of the rationalistic viewpoint of the left hemisphere with the more subtle, more imaginative and actually more intelligent position of the right hemisphere. Both are needed, but the right hemisphere is the more important of the two, since it sees more: and it should always have oversight of the left hemisphere.
Since the Enlightenment we have progressed into a world where we have lost touch with what the right hemisphere knows, with its wisdom and understanding, an understanding that should be a big part of our lives and would be very valuable to us now. In its place we have externalised the left hemisphere’s view of the world into our surroundings, so that everywhere we look the view reinforces in us the same left hemisphere bias. As a result there is a positive feedback loop which is intensifying, resulting in a spread of what one might, for short, call autistic tendencies, both in children and in the culture in general.
I should say that in my view autism isn’t a single simple entity. But an aspect which is almost universal is that everything must be made explicit – the left hemisphere understands effectively only explicit meaning, whereas the right hemisphere importantly understands implicit meaning. Another related difference is that the right hemisphere understands the meaning of context and that things change when the context changes; whereas the left hemisphere thinks that whatever exists in one context is what it would be in any other context. To point to something rather obvious, many in the West seem to think that there is just one ‘right’ path for a society to follow, and as a result the West has imposed conditions on other cultures that they must embrace if they’re to expect aid from the West. In certain cases we have even supported a war to supplant a culture which is no longer approved from our point of view,even though this culture may have been stable for centuries. Of course it’s not ours, it doesn’t fit with ouregalitarian views; but we have no right to impose our way of thinking on another culture, particularly in the light of themess we’ve made of our own.
HG Parents of autistic children often try to safeguard them, by describing to them every possible scenario – what to do in every eventuality, but it is an impossibility. Would you say that there is a deficiency of the right hemisphere within the autistic?
IM Yes, psychiatrists refer to something called the schizo-autistic spectrum. Schizophrenia and autism are clearly separate conditions, but this term emphasises that they nonetheless have many features in common. These are in part to do with the inability to understand the implicit, tounderstand anything that is not certain, and to try and codify, operationalise, mechanise one’s life in order to be in control of all the possibilities. This is the left hemisphere’s paranoia, if you like: people with this way of thinking are in fact paranoid in a loose sense.
I don’t mean that necessarily they have paranoid delusions that, for example, their neighbours are plotting to kill them, but I mean that they have an anxious attitude to things being out of control. Of course, as one soon learns in life, very little is under one’s control, starting from where you were born, who your parents were, how intelligent you are, how tall you are, how beautiful you are, what your upbringing will be like – none of these things are under your control. So you have to get used to this, and the secret of wisdom is to learn how to use what you have got, and to work with the flow, instead of trying all the time to alter things and rebel against what has been given you.
I’m a Daoist, and in Daoism the idea is that all is part of a wise flow and that the wise person accommodates himself to that flow: resisting it and trying to push in the wrong direction is not going to work. It doesn’t mean that your future is not free, since what you make of it is up to you;but there are certain things you can feel; I can go there and things open up to me, there are possibilities, whereas if I carry on pushing like this, I end up miserable.
There was a big scandal in Britain and quite probably everywhere in the West, over the business of children being encouraged to believe that they might really be of the opposite sex. This used to be a very unusual problem; as a psychiatrist I looked after two people who had such a problem and I was able to help them. I believe they were right to say that they probably weren’t able to live in their biologically assigned sex with comfort. But I never foresaw that this would explode into a general problem where children are made to feel uncertain about what sex they are. I have a very good friend who’s a neuroscientist in Spain; and he told me his 7 and 11 year old daughters came back from school with an outline of a boy and the outline of a girl and they had to put the penis on the girl and find the place for the vagina on the boy.
No wonder the rates of mental illness are escalating. It’s not good for boys, it’s not good for girls. They’ve lost every kind of certainty about how they should be, they are told that they should be able to do everything that they want.And that’s a very bad recipe for happiness.
There’s something called the ‘paradox of choice’. which shows that having a little bit of choice is very good but having a lot of choice causes distress. People can’t make decisions, they question themselves and think ’I’ve made the wrong decision’, and then they’re not happy with the choice that they made.
HG This is an in inevitable process, the further away we move from survival, the closer we get to vagueness and messing with things that really are nonsensical but have a detrimental effect on our well-being, and this is one of them. I personally consider it one of the cruelest things to ever hit humanity, I cannot believe that people are not marching in the streets, that parents are not raging against teachers. Where I live there was a case where parents did do that, the children kept coming back with so much of this kind of material that even parents who couldn’t care less about this subject, who had no awareness of it became enraged because it was so extreme. Another aspect is whatThomas Sowell says about teachers in general – instead of teaching core subjects, they became social activists.
IM Our whole culture has been skewed by a belief that we have achieved a kind of wisdom which never existed in the past; and it’s just something we’ve invented in the last few decades. It’s a quite irrational position to take. Goodness knows it’s not wise, but however wise it was,should it be imposed on everybody? Now everyone who works in a university, in a school, in a hospital, in the police, in the army, is made to go through an indoctrination program which is fairly similar to the sort of things that totalitarian regimes used to impose on their population. It is a kind of brainwashing. In effect it’s trying to say that all one’s intuitions are wrong; but nonetheless people have intuitions and they know from experience that these conflict with the theory they’re being taught. And this produces anxiety, it produces a feeling that unless they go along with this they will be punished, but at the same time they don’t altogether believe what they are being taught is the only right way to think, and so they find themselves in anintolerable situation.
It also brings many practical problems. A lot of young people now are turning away from the professions because they don’t want to be subject to the overwhelming bureaucratic control of a system which is not really interested in whether they’re a good teacher, a good researcher, a good doctor: it’s whether or not their work conforms to certain principles, whether the boxes have been ticked. The people who taught me would rather have given up their careers than go along with this kind of nonsense. The way in which we were educated was precisely to save us from this kind of indoctrination – to examine things, to question them, to say where’s the evidence for this? And of coursethe more ridiculous the proposition you’re trying to impose on people, the less you can afford to tolerate any dissent;so one of the reasons that we are not allowed even to question things that are said about certain ‘protected’ constituencies is that if we once started to question them we would find that these ideas were largely baseless.
HG Yes, and that impacts our freedom of expression because if you start to contort your your truth so to speak, if you compromise what you say and what you don’t say, you’re not being truthful. You don’t have a choice, you’re pushed into a corner and this compromises honesty within society as a whole, everything is compromised.
IM Absolutely, yes. And if I may say, I think the impact of thisis vastly underestimated. You cannot trust people if you think they’re not being truthful, and trust is what a society absolutely depends on. An ancient Chinese emperor said that in order to thrive a society needs three things: weapons, food and trust. If you can’t have all three, get rid of the weapons; if you can’t have two, go without food; but the one thing that you must never, ever lose is trust.
Society depends on trust. We’re not happy when we cannot trust, and trust and truth are words that come from the same root; you cannot trust a society that is untruthful.Our current major loss of trust leads to aggression and confrontation: this war between the sexes, this war between the races, didn’t exist to the same extent when I was growing up. We never thought of a black friend that they were necessarily different from us. We never thought that men and women had to be pitted against one another. But now we have these wars: men don’t trust women anymore and women don’t trust men; and instead of an easy relationship with somebody of another race or another culture, the thing has become almost impossible to negotiate in case you say something that will offend. This is not a healthy position.
HG Yes, and it’s all invented – in the documentary I mentioned we follow Warren’s transition from a feminist in the 60s, when he was a member of the National Organisation for Women and a colleague of Gloria Steinem. Feminism at its root is a Marxist ideology where there is an oppressor and an oppressed
IM Exactly. This is a tragedy because now society is broken into groups in which one is an oppressor and the other oppressed. What’s more, if you really want to see who is being discriminated against now it is white men, who in this country are still a very large part of the population. Fewer and fewer of them are willing to put themselves through being shouted at, reviled and told that they’re worthless: so they don’t want to go to university. In the first place they’re told ‘you won’t get into a good university now because you’re a white male’; so they’re completely discouraged from the word go, and often rather than put themselves up to university only to be rejected in favour of somebody who’s not necessarily cleverer or better educated, but simply ticks the boxes, they decide to do without university. The universities are killing themselves now. Universities are short of funds, and having a department of DEI is very expensive. So-called consultants in DEI are employed at sometimes higher salaries than the professors, or than the consultant doctors, in the institutions that these people are supposedly overseeing. More generally managers are telling people who have years of experience, perhaps a lifetime of experience, of skill in their job, what to do. This is surely a crazy situation. Then what happens is, because the costs keep rising, they are taking people from overseas whose main qualification is not their intellect but simply that they can pay large sums of money to come to a once-prestigious university such as Oxford.
HG You wrote that because it is ideology led, when people look at text they see ideology rather than history.
IM Yes, ideology rather than knowledge. This reverses the direction of education, which is supposedly to expand your horizons, not to narrow them. If you look at the past you’ll find ‘patriarchy’, if that’s how you think, but you’ll misseverything else. You said in your note that context is very important and I believe it is extremely important because things are only what they are in the context in which they arise. We think of the world as put together out of contextless elements, like assembling a machine – a piece, and another piece, and another piece; but actually everything is what it is – that piece, that fragment that you have located is actually only what it is – because of the web of connections and relationships in which it exists.
I believe there are no things separate from the context that created them; and as a result, that relationships are more important, come before, the things that are related. If you imagine a web, you may notice in that web something, and you lock onto it: you say ‘there’s a thing, I can see it’. But it is only what it is because of the network of connections in which it exists.
We’re constantly ripping things out of context. There are several very important contexts that we are neglecting. One is the context of history. I don’t believe that we are atomistic individuals that just suddenly arise in the world and go about doing what we want; we are part of a stream, a flow, and that flow is continuous. It was there before we were born, it will go on after we die; we come out of it and we contribute to it when we’re alive, and then we go back into the flow. That context is now missing because we no longer think it important to teach children about the history of their civilisation. When I was at school we learnt about the Greeks and the Romans, we had to learn about medieval thought, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and so on, to know where it is we stand; so that the ideas we have are not just out of nowhere, but we know something about what happened in history when people thought like that.
The context of embodiment is being eroded. We are not pieces of electronic equipment that ‘upload’ and ‘download’ thoughts and have ‘data banks’ and so on. We are flesh and blood, and as a result we feel things, we have emotions, we have deep relationships to the world and to others and this is something that you cannot find in the technical data. More and more people are encouraged just to look at the technical data, the words on the page, but not to understand the rest. Sometimes what is not said is more important than what is said. This is often true of the things that are really deep and important: poetry, music, art, myths, narratives, rituals, and above all the ways in which we understand ourselves as a species in relation to nature and in relation to the cosmos at large. These things cannot be written down in the language of a dishwasher manual:these are things that have to be expressed indirectly, implicitly. Consequently if you only see the explicit, you miss most of everything.
I started off at Oxford by studying literature; and the thing that impressed itself on me was that the work of art was implicit. When you made the meaning of the poem explicit, it seemed trivial, but in its context it was profoundly important. When you read a poem, it’s conveying many,many things to you; when you read the ‘translation’ into another context it’s saying almost nothing to you.
We miss the importance of social context, too. This is one of the ways in which we find fulfilment. We know that one of the principal causes of happiness for most people is the sense of belonging to a social group where they can trust people, with whom they can share values, with whom they can share their lives. This is one of the things from which people get fulfilment – not just emotional fulfilment, but psychical and physical health.
I write about this at the end of The Master And His Emissary. There is a place called Roseto, a close-knit community of Italian immigrants in Pennsylvania; what puzzled social scientists was why the people there seemed to enjoy such good health. They had higher than average levels of smoking, they had higher than average levels of alcohol consumption, they didn’t look after their weight, they took less exercise than the norm, but they remained healthier than the norm. The secret was that, as a largely coherent Italian community, they were able to share their houses with one another, they shared their meals with one another, and they worshipped together; and that had an impact on their physical health as well as of course on their mental health, and on their ability to trust people, and therefore to be able to cooperate. This is what we’re born for, but what we have neglected.
Another context that we miss is also very important: the context of nature. Until 1800 almost everybody in the world would have lived in close contact with nature and even in cities there was a great deal of green space; but in the last 200 years more and more people have been uprooted from the communities where their people lived for thousands of years, taken to cities to live in slums, where they are truly poor for the first time, and alienated from the natural world. There’s a mass of research that shows that immersion innature, even being peacefully alone and paying attention to nature for an hour or two several times a week, is every bit as important as anything else you can do. It increases your cognitive sharpness, if that’s of importance to you; it makes you happier, less prone to depression and aggression; and it improves your physical health as well. I don’t think that nature is there to lower my blood pressure – that’s a utilitarian way of thinking that is typical of the way we live now – but it is something that is much greater than us, out of which we come. We were born out of nature, not out of the environment, which suggests something around us to be managed – there might be a ‘department’ of the environment, indeed there is in this country; but nature, which literally means something out of which we were born and to which we will return when we die.
The third great context which we miss is the world of the sacred and the spiritual. I was taken by surprise when I wrote The Matter of Things. I knew about the effects of nature being very well researched, and I knew about the effects of social cohesion, but not about the effects of a spiritual life.
Out of curiosity I decided to research whether indeed having a spiritual life has an impact on thriving; and the evidence is undeniable that it has the biggest impact of all. It doesn’t matter in what way or with whom, but worshipping, having a sense of something bigger and overarching that induces a sense of wonder and a sense of humility in us, a sense of the sacred and the divine, has a colossal effect on our ability to thrive. We have become arrogant and hubristic, we think we know everything, we think we understand everything; but in fact our knowledge is a drop, and our ignorance an ocean, as William James once said.
So, yes to your idea that context is very important – I sometimes say context is everything, and I mean it, because nothing is what it is without a context.
HG The aspect of spirituality and trust is fascinating. Jordan Peterson asked why does it matter that we socialise with people? Many reasons, but one I never considered is that interaction acts as a compass, helps us ‘position’ ourselves. When we talk to other people, when we move around other people, when they move around us, without even thinking about it we sort of reposition ourselves. If you’re on your own and there’s never any ‘bouncing back’ from anybody, how do you know where you belong? how do you know if what you think resonates or is nonsense? This is so crucial that when we want to punish somebody we isolate them, deprive them of company.
IM Yes, we’re beings who exist through connections. But I believe everything exists through connection: relations are foundational. If you wanted to make people really unhappy, you’d cut them off socially, as you say, you’d isolate them, you’d cut them off from the natural world, you’d lead them to believe that having spiritual orientation is childish or something that only uneducated people would have, and then you would lead them finally to doubt their own bodily existence, to think that they can reverse nature and do whatever they want with it, and still be happy. If you wanted really to render a people suicidally depressed, that’s what you’d do; and that is the society we now have in the West.
I knew very little about the Jewish faith until about 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve always been interested in theology, but that’s been mainly Christian theology and Eastern religion,Zen, Buddhism, Daoism. But one of my colleagues, a Christian theologian, started talking to me about the Kabbalah; and that was the beginning of a long search. Time and time again, I’ve discovered in the Kabbalahresonances with insights that came to me through philosophy and neuroscience over 30 years or more. Time and again, I thought, yes, this is something very important about the nature of ourselves, intuitively understood in theKabbalah, and now confirmed by science. I found this type of resonance also in other traditions around the world, but the Kabbalah in particular had a big influence on me, and I write about it in The Matter With Things.
HG What a gift you have – the ability to articulate all of this, I think this might explain why you managed to penetrate the mainstream.
IM I don’t know quite how that’s happened, but many people seem to respond to it. There are two very common things people say to me: ‘when I first came across your work it blew my mind, you know’; but the other is ‘I now see the world anew, and I cannot see it in the same way I used to see it before. I see everything through a new way of looking.’ And they sometimes also say ‘it’s something I knew intuitively, at some level – what you were saying, I kind of knew this, but I had no way of putting it into words,and what you’ve helped me do is put it into words’.
HG With regards to this disregard for history, this dismissal of all that came before us, this ignorant way of seeing the whole of history as one entity – all that came before us is old and irrelevant – they don’t see the continuum that you were talking about earlier.
IM This is not only a damaging way to think, it’s highly irrational. Why would it be that all these people who lived much more intensely real lives than we do – not remotely,through machines and things, but actually in contact with nature – and endured wars, and all the rest, why would their insights into existence be dismissible? Why would it be better that I base everything I know on my tiny experience as an individual than on the whole body of wisdom that we have been given as a tradition? Tradition is not something to jettison, tradition is a living source of wisdom.
People think tradition means a kind of fossilization, but in fact tradition is the only way in which you can effect change– it’s quite the opposite. Without a tradition you don’t know how to change; a tradition is never static. I can’t point to any period of the last 2,000 years in the West when thinking was static for any long period of time; things were happening and changing, but there was always a tradition.
The difference between having a tradition and not having one is this. We are like a plant, and a plant needs to grow, and it can grow up a wall, it can grow wherever you wish it to grow; but if you want it to go somewhere, you don’t chop it off at the root and stick it where you want it to go, you allow it to go there by training it. It will always be going somewhere new; and similarly a tradition is a living flow that is our key to organic change. The trouble is we’ve lost the sense of organic change. Instead we think mechanistically, and this is badly wrong: we say ‘cut it off’, or ‘this is right in theory, so this is what we’ll do’. And then, of course, the plant, cut off, withers; and soon the civilization has fallen apart. I believe our civilisation is in fact very close to collapse.
HG This brings to mind the Gustav Mahler quote ‘tradition is not the worship of ashes, it is the preservation of fire’. There is the danger that if you believe, like what you just described, that you can just ‘chop the plant at the roots’ – if you let the fire die out, you will not be able to restart it. We talked earlier about the fact that children are not being prepared for life, they are unskilled and lack resilience – what you end up with, like what Thomas Sowell says about the fall of the Roman Empire, is us looking at the ashes and ruins without the tools to rebuild.
IM Yes, I may be fortunate or unfortunate in that respect, depending on how you look at it, but I suppose all that I’m doing is bringing a knowledge of a number of different areas together – history, philosophy, literature, science. And this was once normal, but the probable reason that people pay attention to what I’m saying is that I’m one of the last people fortunate enough to have benefited from that kind of education. I’m lucky in that way, or you could say I’m unfortunate to live at this time.
I think there’s a sense in which our culture has become feminized. I believe that in the past there was very much a need for a balance; and when I was a young man I called myself a feminist. I thought it was absolutely wonderful, because there were many ways of thinking and many values that were traditionally associated with women that were underrepresented in the postwar culture, and I saw that it would be wonderful to see those flourish. Soon, however, it became so that the traditionally female was actually decried, and at the same time everything that was traditionally male was simultaneously enjoined on women and denigrated. Now, in order to get on in the world, women were forced to have both a career and look after children, or they had to decide to forgo having children or having a career; but anyway, in this situation, they were forced to become more male, in the sense that their attitudes, their dispositions became more manlike.
So at the same time that we could have celebrated preserving and perpetuating the values and views that have traditionally been those of women, what has actually happened is that women have deserted those, and adopted a male position, at the same time pointing to male values as the problem. This is an incoherent position.
The feminization of culture: we prefer non-confrontation to confrontation, but sometimes confrontation is necessary. I’m a non-confrontational person myself: I’m perhaps not a typical male. But I do know that there are times when it’svery important to say ‘no, this is wrong, there’s a boundary that’s been crossed here’; and we know that women are much more tolerant of what I think is a pathological culture of wokeism out of a misplaced desire not to offend anyone.Society needs a degree of cohesion and it’s losing that cohesion.
I stress once again that I’m in favour of the culture learning from women’s wisdom, but the obsession with ‘safety’ –the aversion to any kind of risk nowadays – is crippling society, and has in fact itself become a danger. ‘Safe spaces’ and all that: well, look, if you’re going to go to university you do need to grow up. What we need is to have conversations in which we challenge one another, and we say ‘I don’t think like that, but I respect your position:now tell me why it is that you think this’. We need to have proper conversations. But if you try to have those conversations now, the process gets shut down, and there are protests. Well, that’s the death of a university, and I think in a bigger sense it’s the death of a culture.
The way our life is organised is to minimise risk. But when you minimise risk you minimise achievement. Civilisations are built by people who are prepared to be courageous, to be adventurous; and we’ve become lazy and entitled. We think that it’s our right to benefit from a civilisation without contributing to it, without enduring the hardships that go with preserving a civilization: standing up for the things that matter.