The Master and His Emissary The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 7 IMITATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE

Author: Iain McgilChrist Publisher: London, UK: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2010 Review Date: Status:💥


Annotations

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a pattern in the course of Western history. I believe there has been a succession of shifts of balance between the hemispheres over the last 2,000 years,

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The history of the West shows times when a move forward in one hemisphere ‘releases’ a move forward in the other, according to Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘these two very different drives [the Apollonian and Dionysian] exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking one another to give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring, in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them’.1 But we have now reached a point where, for reasons I have suggested, the balance has swung too far – perhaps irretrievably far – towards the Apollonian left hemisphere, which now appears to believe that it can do anything, make anything, on its own. Like the emissary in the fable, it has grown tired of its subservience to the Master, and as a result the survival of the domain they share is, in my view, in the balance.

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[In those other cultures where there have been major scientific advances] science is just one of a number of activities in the culture, and attention devoted to it changes in the same way attention devoted to the other features may change, with the result that there is competition for intellectual resources within an overall balance of interests in the culture… . [In the West] the traditional balance of interests is replaced by a dominance of scientific concerns, while science itself experiences a rate of growth that is pathological by the standards of earlier cultures, but is ultimately legitimated by the cognitive standing that it takes on. This form of scientific development is exceptional and anomalous.5

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Gaukroger, 2006, p. 11.

  1. ibid., p. 18.

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If I am right that there have been shifts in hemisphere balance, why have they come about? To the historian, a multitude of social and economic factors will inevitably be involved in the process whereby many events unfolded which led to such cataclysmic movements in the history of ideas, and I have no doubt that, as always, chance also played an important role. However, such social and economic factors inevitably exist in an inextricably involved dynamic relationship with changes in the way we look at the world, and are indeed simply part of another way of describing the process.

Note: I’d say it’s both. The economic system reinforces a left hemisphere perspective, but also began with one

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Each aspect that we choose to bring into focus makes a different aspect stand forth out of a nexus in which no one element can be said to have caused all the others, since what look like ‘elements’ are simply facets of the indivisible human condition. If one holds one set of factors steady – say, the economic – then one appears to have accounted for everything in those terms. But hold another set steady – whether social, institutional, intellectual, or of any other kind – and the picture may look equally convincing. The fact is that nothing can in reality be ‘held steady’ in this way: all is in a constant state of dynamic interaction.

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And one of the factors in this interaction, I suggest, has been the need to resolve the inherently unstable relationship between the worlds delivered by the two hemispheres.

One does not need to posit drives that are instantiated in the hemispheres. Up to now, the discussion has been of the cerebral hemispheres strictly within the context of the single human individual. In that context, I may sometimes have spoken almost as if they were personalities, with values and goals of their own. As I have argued, that is not as big a distortion as might first appear: they are substantial parts of a living being, which certainly does have values and goals. However, we are now turning to look at the ‘battle of the hemispheres’, as one might call it, over long periods of history, often, though not invariably, longer than the lifetime of any one brain.

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Shifts in culture are hugely important, not just matters of intellectual fashion: it’s not simply a question of ‘last season the collar was narrow, this season it’ll be broad’. Without imputing drives to the hemispheres, one can see that each hemispheric world is complemented by the other, and in a situation where one predominates, the lack of the other will become increasingly apparent. As I hope to demonstrate in the next chapter, it seems that the two hemispheres became more independent of one another’s operations at an early point in the history of the West. Greater independence allows each hemisphere to go further in its own direction, with a relative enhancement, or exaggeration, depending on the point of view, of its intrinsic mode of operation. This situation has its dramatic rewards, but is also more unstable than one in which there is less polarisation, and invites divergence from, and subsequent regression towards, the mean position, rather than an enduring equipoise. That divergence is a contributory factor, therefore, to the shifts of balance.

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More specifically we know that there is a continual tendency for the authenticity of right hemisphere ‘presencing’ to be transformed into an inauthentic ‘re-presenting’ in the left; in essence, what was living becomes a cliché. The experience of the inauthenticity of the right hemisphere’s world as it is represented in the left may then, logically, lead in one of two directions, and I believe we can see them both exemplified in the history that we will be looking at in this part of the book.

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In the first, we remain within the realm of homeostasis, of negative feedback, of ‘swings of the pendulum’. There is a natural reaction, resulting in a return to the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world itself. This, however, in turn is doomed soon to be co-opted by the left hemisphere and become inauthentic again.

In the second, however, there is not a return to the right-hemisphere world, but on the contrary a rejection of it, since it now comes to be seen as intrinsically – rather than contingently having become – inauthentic, and therefore as invalid. Instead of a corrective swing of the pendulum, therefore, there is a loss of homeostasis, and the result is positive feedback, whereby the left hemisphere’s values simply become further entrenched. This also helps to explain why the left hemisphere necessarily gains ground over time.

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Today all the available sources of intuitive life – cultural tradition, the natural world, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by the world of words, mechanistic systems and theories constituted by the left hemisphere that their power to help us see beyond the hermetic world that it has set up has been largely drained from them. I have referred to the fact that a number of influential figures in the history of ideas, among them Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, have noted a gradual encroachment over time of rationality on the natural territory of intuition or instinct. In terms of the evolutionary history of the brain, Panksepp has expressed similar ideas:

The level of integration between brain areas may be changing as a function of cerebral evolution. One reasonable way for corticocognitive evolution to proceed is via the active inhibition of more instinctual subcortical impulses. It is possible that evolution might actually promote the disconnection of certain brain functions from others. For instance, along certain paths of cerebral evolution, perhaps in emerging branches of the human species, there may be an increasing disconnection of cognitive from emotional processes. This may be the path of autism, in its various forms.6

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  1. Panksepp, 1998, pp. 426–7, n. 19 (emphasis added).

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It has not been a smooth and even process, however: more like a tug of war in which the players move back and forth, but ground is continually lost by one side. And I agree with them that ultimately the balance has gone further and further towards what we can now see to be the world of the left hemisphere – despite everything we know from Part I suggesting that what it knows must be reintegrated with the broader understanding of the right.

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surely ideas do spread by contagion, and no doubt in one sense in competition with one another, concepts solemnised in Dawkins’s ‘memes’, the cultural equivalent of genes. A meme is said to be a replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind, examples being ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’9 and other concepts, ideas, theories, opinions, beliefs, practices, habits, dances and moods, ultimately, and inevitably, including the idea of God – the Dawkins delusion. This is a perfect example, incidentally, of the left hemisphere’s way of construing its own history, not least in its way of breaking a culture into atomistic fragments devoid of context, as though snippets of behaviour, feeling or thinking – of experience, in other words – stuck together in large enough numbers, constitute the world in which we live.

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  1. Dawkins, 1976, p. 192.

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Memes are seen mechanistically as ‘replicators’, like genes engineering perfect copies of themselves. In the case of gene replication, variation enters in only by accident, by random mutation caused by errors in transcription, or by interference with gene structure from environmental sources, such as radiation. The machinery makes a mistake or is handed shoddy materials, but, as long as it remains in this story, it remains a machine. The equivalent for a meme would be my misremembering a tune, or mishearing it in the first place. But ‘memes’ if they existed would be replicating, unlike genes, within a mind: a mind whose constant interaction with what ever comes to it leaves nothing unchanged or unconnected with something else. We are imitators, not copying machines.

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Human imitation is not slavish. It is not a mechanical process, dead, perfect, finished, but one that introduces variety and uniqueness to the ‘copy’, which above all remains alive, since it becomes instantiated in the context of a different, unique human individual. Imitation is imaginatively entering into the world of the one that is imitated, as anyone who has tried the exercise of imitating an author’s style will know. That is perhaps what we mean by style: not a fashion, just something superficial, taken up or put off, as it sounds, like a garment, but an essence – le style, c’est l’homme. Even to attend to anything so closely that one can capture its essence is not to copy slavishly. To Ruskin it was one of the hardest, as well as one of the greatest human achievements, truly to see, so as to copy and capture the life of, a single leaf – something the greatest artists had managed only once or twice in a life time: ‘If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.’10 Imitating nature may be like imitating another person’s style; one enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator. In imitation one takes up something of another person, but not in an inert, lifeless, mechanical sense; rather in the sense of its being aufgehoben, whereby it is taken into ourselves and transformed. If one needs to be convinced that there is no necessary opposition between imagination and imitation, one need only look at the long, rich history of Oriental culture. In fact imitation is imagination’s most powerful path into whatever is Other than ourselves.

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  1. Ruskin, 1904, vol. 5, Part VI, ch. v, §2, p. 39 (emphasis in original).

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more empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others. In an important study of this phenomenon, there was a contrast between the empathy people said they felt and the empathy they actually evinced, involuntarily, in their faces and bodies. Individuals who were already established as low in empathy didn’t display the same emotion in their faces as high-empathy subjects, but reported in words feeling the same – the feelings their conscious left hemispheres knew that they ought to feel.15

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  1. Sonnby-Borgström, 2002.

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Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.23

Imitation gives rise, paradoxically as it may seem, to individuality. That is precisely because the process is not mechanical reproduction, but an imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different because of its intersubjective betweenness. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based.

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  1. Benjamin, 1986, p. 332. Similarly Adorno wrote: ‘The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings’ (2005, p. 154).

Notes