The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

The prevailing dominant account of a meaningless, purely material cosmos, supplied by the reductionist strategy of the left hemisphere, fails to make sense of value, whether that be truth, goodness or beauty, just as it fails to make sense of consciousness. Its answer in every case is the same: that they must be emanations of that purely material cosmos – emanations of matter – that exist purely to further utility. It seems to me that, if you believe that, you will believe anything; you might even end up believing that consciousness is an illusion.

Earlier I gave a number of examples of how organisms do not wait around for chance to save them from extinction, but both greatly accelerate, and appear to select, new mutations, so that they can recover something as complex as flagella within as little as a few days, rather than over the many millennia that chance mutation would require. We now know that even egg and sperm do not just meet randomly, but both are actively selective.30 To quote Kolakowski: The evolutionary process teems with dead ends, failures, half-baked projects, and circuitous routes; nature proceeds somewhat gropingly, often trying several roads before it finds the right one. But it is driven constantly by an inherent tendency, and to uncover this tendency would be to understand the life of the universe.

There is what Koonin calls ‘staggering complexity inherent even in the minimally functional translation system’, leading to ‘the dramatic paradox of the origin of life’: in order to attain the minimal complexity required for a biological system to get on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required. How such a system could evolve, is a puzzle that defeats conventional evolutionary thinking, all of which is about biological systems moving along the spiral

The instinct to reject the sort of God and the sort of design that the machine model implies is surely right; yet Dawkins and his disciples continue to espouse it, just substituting the random installation of a blind algorithm for a divine plan. In doing so they have the least plausible of all worlds: a mechanistic universe, but one without a mechanic. If I believed the universe was mechanistic, I hope I’d have enough insight to be troubled by the question ‘How is it that the universe is such that it is so highly ordered that it appears to all observers to have design, given there are no purposes?’ Does that not in itself suggest a purpose at a meta-level? Does not a universe in which there are purposes imply purposiveness is latent in that universe?

I recall a remark of comedian Peter Cook’s: ‘As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how unimportant … they are.’

The so-called kamikaze horsehair worm (Paragordius tricuspidatus) has a similarly ingenious life story. First, the tiny larva is eaten by the larva of another insect, such as a mosquito or mayfly: once this emerges, a cricket will gobble it up. The horsehair worm then develops inside the cricket. However, its final stage of development needs to take place in water. Since crickets don’t swim, and don’t tend to live near water, the worm has a problem. It solves this by hijacking the cricket’s nervous system, impelling it to jump – against its nature – into water. Once the cricket drowns, the horsehair worm is free to emerge and reproduce.53 Now it’s got a mechanism, it works well: but how did it survive long enough, as a species, to develop the necessary ability to compel a cricket towards water by sheer chance, given that it needs water to reproduce from the outset? It would fall at the first fence.

As Whitehead observes, life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead. Only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time … The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. They certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them. It may be possible to explain “the origin of species” by the doctrine of the struggle for existence among such organisms. But certainly this struggle throws no light whatever upon the emergence of such a general type of complex organism, with faint survival power.

And once they arrived, why did organisms further evolve towards creatures with vastly lower survival prospects? A tree can live a thousand years. A human life is on average 70–80 years, and until recently considerably less. Individual examples of some actinobacteria, however, are thought to be over a million years old, and still going strong.68 In the survival stakes we lose hands down to a monocellular organism.

An everyday example of it is the existence of sexual reproduction. In the short-to-medium term, as he points out, needing to find a suitable member of the opposite sex with whom to reproduce greatly reduces the chances of reproductive success, and at the same time halves the number of potential reproductive units. Once established, it works – but at the outset there would be grave competitive disadvantages without their being offset by the advantages that come only further down the line. How this happened remains, as he puts it, ‘utterly unclear.’

Charlton deduces that there must be a mechanism of teleological intent, either in the form of a hitherto unknown source of information built into the cell’s own structure, or in the form of a field that acts on the whole form, much as Sheldrake has proposed.

The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, for example, says that God ‘exists, but not through existence.’34 If you are frustrated by this deeply paradoxical form of words, I can understand; but do not succumb to the temptation to dismiss it. His point is an important one: that to predicate existence of God is to mistake the divine nature. God cannot be said to ‘exist’, a word which in its origins means to ‘stand forth’ (Latin, ex- out, + -sistere, reduplicative of stare, to stand) in the way that a thing stands forth for us against the ground of our already existing field of vision. God is that ground. God is above all not a thing alongside other things – even one equipped with ultra-special powers. God simply is – in a use of the verb that requires that we understand God both to have Being and to be the ground of Being at one and the same time.

Dionysius the Areopagite says, God is ‘the cause of being for all, but is itself nonbeing, for it is beyond all being.’

What the term ‘God’ requires of us is not a set of propositions about what cannot be known but a disposition towards what must be recognised as beyond human comprehension. The primary response, therefore, is not intellectual. It is awe and wonder – not mere curiosity, which motivates us to find out more information, more knowledge (valuable as that is), but wonder at the immensity of what we must recognise we can never know. Yet that very wonder is what increasingly we lack. ‘As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines’, wrote Abraham Heschel: Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.

In the Diamond Sutra, it is said that knowing is seeing, but seeing is not knowing.60 By this I understand that true knowing, understanding, is not a matter of accumulating facts, but a form of perception in which one at last sees into the depth of things as it were ‘at once’, and recognises them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections – something like the process described by Thoreau.

Wordsworth’s: A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Everything that I have written seems to me like chaff compared to those things that I have seen and which have been revealed to me.

It also resonates with a beautiful and (formerly) well-known phrase from the New Testament: ‘in him we live, and move, and have our being’.

In some places, Cusanus images God’s relation to the world by using the metaphor of light. We cannot see light if there is nothing to reflect it (space looks dark, even though light constantly passes through it). When there is a reflection, we see not light, but the object that reflects it. Light itself we cannot see: yet in its absence we can see nothing.

The fourteenth-century Persian mystic poet Hafiz wrote: ‘I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through.’

And power? Power as understood by the right hemisphere is permissive: creative power, the power to allow things to come into being, precisely by underwriting the existence of a creative field, but not interfering and manipulating within it. Not making things happen according to fiat, but allowing things to grow. That is true creation.

There is an ambiguity to the account of the creation in Genesis. Each act of creation is initiated by God saying ‘let’ something come into being. This can be seen as a command, exercising controlling power, but as I have already suggested this is at odds with the idea of a free creation which God ‘saw’ for the first time as it came into being.

The poet Gregory Orr writes: One of the terms we poets use in our considerable effort to avoid religious and spiritual terminology is ‘beautiful’. Of course no one can define the word, or everybody defines it differently, and yet we believe in it. Beauty is an article of faith among poets. I think many of us are trying to sidestep religion, and beauty is a word we use to do that.

Pushkin’s wonderful long poem Yevgeny Onegin begins: ‘When my uncle, a man of principles, fell ill ne v shutku …’ Ne v shutku means ‘not in jest’. So, ‘seriously’, then? It won’t do at all: ‘fell seriously ill’ happens to convey a truth, but the least important part of the truth. Because the point is that the uncle was a tedious old hypochondriac, a valetudinarian who was always crying wolf and keeping the family at his bedside, cooling their heels: and, then, at last he really was ill. Only the formulation ‘not in jest’ conveys all of this picture in one little phrase.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

Czesław Miłosz quotes ‘an old Jew of Galicia’: When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let them thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say it is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he is 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

‘A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism’, wrote Bacon already in 1597; ‘but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.’

Science can’t pronounce on moral principles, and it can’t answer the question of God’s existence one way or the other. That doesn’t mean there is a conflict here between science and God: that would only be possible if, on the contrary, it could answer the question.

According to a book-length study of the beliefs and characteristics of Nobel Laureates,287 overall only 10.5% described themselves as ‘atheist, agnostic, freethinker or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives’. What is striking, however, is that while the figure reaches as high as 35% for Laureates in literature, the figures for science are 8.9% in physiology/medicine, 7.1% in chemistry, and 4.7% in physics.

And given the commonalities between right hemisphere deficit conditions and autistic spectrum disorders, it is relevant that autism-spectrum disorders make belief in God less likely (in a series of four studies, neurotypical (viz, ‘normal’) subjects were 10 times as likely as those on the spectrum strongly to endorse the idea of God).

The evidence is also that religious belief has a dramatic positive impact on both psychological and physical health, certainly comparable with, if not superior to, most ‘lifestyle’ changes known to modern medicine to have a beneficial effect; and is associated with prosocial behaviour (Appendix 8

According to the great philologist Max Müller, Soul is the Gothic saivala, and this is clearly related to another Gothic word, saivs, which means the sea. The sea was called saivs from a root si or siv, the Greek seio, to shake; it meant the tossed-about water, in contradistinction to stagnant or running water. The soul being called saivala, we see that it was originally conceived by the Teutonic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.

We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves’, the universe ‘peoples’. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Want requires fulfilment. On the other hand, wonder leads to longing of a spiritual kind, which is fulfilled in itself, ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction’, in Lewis’s words. ‘I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from happiness and from pleasure.’

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things … are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard,

Jürgen Habermas sees Christianity playing a tacit role in modern society far beyond that of a mere precursor or a catalyst. He, like many others, views our contemporary allegiance to freedom of life, social solidarity, emancipation, individual morality of conscience, justice, and human rights as directly derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The fact that our civilisation has not yet completely fallen apart is a demonstration not that the tradition can be dispensed with, but that it continues, for a while, to be rooted in our psyche.

When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged – even admired – in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame. And that can’t help but make a difference to how we behave.

Viktor Frankl. And he continued: Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, and the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it – or fail to fill it – that give significance to our existence.

In contemplating totalitarianism and its atrocities, such as the Nazi death camps, Hannah Arendt speaks of ‘radical evil’, by which she means a form of wrongdoing which is not captured by other moral concepts. Central to it is the making of humans into things, devitalised automata, living corpses without will or spontaneity. ‘According to Arendt a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn’t done for humanly understandable motives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and the idea that everything is possible.’354 In other words, the self of the evil-doer, too, is destroyed, in the service of a power greater than itself, the ideal of which is simply – power. Power to do anything and everything possible. We have that lust within us.

One way of thinking of this (it is hardly original) is that a divine principle of love needs something Other to love, since love is essentially directed outwards; that that Other must be free to respond, since a love that is compelled is not love; and that this necessarily means that the Other must be free to reject the love that is proffered. This seems to me necessarily true, if such a divine principle of love exists.

the crowded, noisy ignorance of the modern world is less easily invaded by knowledge than was the silence of illiterate epochs. But the peril is more positive … Each faction of the unassembled body of integration, each with a part of truth but standing alone, asserting itself alone, multiplies disintegration; causes a pendulum swing from one partial extreme to another.

Cultures can be characterised by four main measures, according to the most widely adopted criteria in cross-cultural psychology, those of Geert Hofstede: greater or lesser inequalities of power, greater or lesser autonomy, more or less structured codes of behaviour, and more or less fluid roles for men and women.28 To these he later added measures of longer-term (self-denying) or shorter-term (self-gratifying) orientation. The seeming paradox lies in the fact that countries that score ‘best’ (as the prevailing climate of opinion would see it) in terms of these factors – that is to say societies with lower power inequalities, greater autonomy, less structured codes of behaviour, and ‘low masculinity’ – have higher rates of mental illness and suicide.

Findings from the Cigna US Loneliness Index 2018 include: when asked how often they feel like no-one knows them well, more than half of the respondents surveyed said they feel that way always or sometimes; approaching half of respondents felt that their relationships were not meaningful; more than half of adults aged 18–22 identify with 10 of the 11 feelings associated with loneliness.

Ultimately of course we cannot really know fully who we are. But we can know what we are not. We are definitely not the lonely, isolated, predatory egos we have been taught to think of ourselves as being; hurled into an alien universe, mere accidents of cosmic history, whose lives, like the cosmos itself, are pitifully devoid of meaning, purpose and value. We are not the playthings of necessity. Nor in our dealings with Nature are we merely detached observers, manipulative, tinpot gods – in our dealings with one another forever doomed to fight with and destroy one another. Power and pleasure are not our only values, nor by any means our greatest values, nor do they on their own satisfy us, add beauty and goodness to existence, or help save us from ourselves. The boxes into which we force reality are a mental expedient, since no two things and no two people are ever really the same in any quality whatsoever, except the fact of their existence. This is central, because all is, once it is properly seen, unique; and it is the business of living to unfold that unending potential for uniqueness.

One distinguishing feature of depression is the excessive willingness to accept responsibility, as in delusional guilt;

And a disposition towards gratitude – being appreciative of and thankful for the kindness of others – correlates with the volume of the right inferior temporal cortex.

The myth that people believed the earth was flat until Columbus proved them wrong is an example of major, motivated, misdirection. As early as the sixth century BC, Pythagoras – and later Aristotle and Euclid – wrote about the earth as a sphere. Eratosthenes at the beginning of the second century BC devised a method for calculating, fairly accurately, the circumference of the spherical earth.14 When Ptolemy wrote his Geography in the second century AD he considered the idea of a round planet as taken for granted.

The Upanishads refer to two kinds of knowledge, apara vidya (knowledge via the intellect and the senses, limited to a finite world) and para vidya (knowledge via the soul, which is not just subjective experience of concepts and emotions, but oneness with the infinite). Apara vidya presupposes a knower, a thing that is known, and the act of knowing. Para vidya, by contrast, is the attainment of knowledge through oneness with Brahman, the creative principle revealed in the whole cosmos.52 It is thought to be the purpose of life to attain para vidya.

This group of ‘anti-theists’ were atypical of atheists as a whole, scoring highest of the six groups on four of the personality scales – autonomy, anger, dogmatism and narcissism – and lowest on agreeableness.62 Stronger belief in God is linked to more intuitive thinking.

That the religious, both communally and individually, are happier, and dramatically healthier, both mentally and physically, as well as better adjusted, more resilient and more prosocial in their habits, also does not prove that religion is true. But it suggests that we and our societies function poorly when we neglect it, and that human thriving and fulfilment depend on it to a considerable extent.

Religion is a noted source of a sense of purpose. A study relating sense of purpose in life to longevity found that those with the lowest ‘life purpose’ had a two and a half times greater chance of death in the five-year period of the study than those with the highest. This finding survived adjustments for body mass index, level of physical activity, alcohol consumption, chronic illness, and even smoking status. The finding is in line with those from a number of previous studies in both East and West.