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

by Iain McGilchrist

Finally, though the ‘takes’ of the two hemispheres are made to work together below the level of conscious awareness, they are not strictly compatible. This is most obvious when, as in our society, our thinking is no longer embodied in the practices, traditions and rituals of a community, but is developed in explicit, public, often political debate, where much of its subtlety, and tolerance of necessary ambiguity, gets lost. Once dragged into the light of day and scrutinised, the hemisphere ‘takes’ are seen often to pull in opposite directions. The catch is that in such a society as ours, any apparent inconsistency is treated as a sign of error or intellectual muddle. Ambiguity is no longer a strength, given that truth is known to be complicated and many-layered; it is a weakness, since truth is thought of as single and straightforward. It is therefore easier to accept the left hemisphere’s point of view, which is easily articulated and unambiguous and simply stands in contradiction to the right hemisphere’s view, than to accept that of the right hemisphere, which is more multifaceted and harder to articulate, and is already inclusive of the apparently incompatible left hemisphere’s point of view. This virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore dismissed.