← UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
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- [00:00]
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- [00:34]
Financial Advisor
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- [01:28]
Freddie
Hello and welcome back to unherd. Iain McGilchrist is one of our favourite thinkers here at Unherd. He's a neuroscientist, a philosopher, a writer, and his central theory of the bihemispheric brain, the divided brain, and how each of the two parts of our brain think differently about the world and how, if we understand that, we can better understand how, how humans think, has really developed an enormous following over the past few years and is growing rapidly all the time. When we first spoke to him a few years ago, it felt like he was almost a discovery. And now Ian is one of the biggest names, both on the Internet and on the lecture circuit and all around the world. And he's about to become the chancellor of a new university over in the us. So I'm delighted to have him rejoin us here, here at Unherd and talk specifically about religion and myth, which is a kind of new territory for him and how that fits in to his bigger theories around the divided brain. Ian McGilchrist, welcome back to Unherd.
- [02:33]
Ian McGilchrist
Oh, thank you, Freddie. Lovely to be back. Thank you.
- [02:37]
Freddie
You must have been asked so many thousands of times to restate your fundamental theory, but I'm afraid I'm going to ask you 1001 times for those listeners or viewers who may not have come across you yet, what are the two hemispheres of the Brain and how do they differ from each other?
- [02:55]
Ian McGilchrist
Yes. Well, the first thing to say is, forget all the things you think you know about it, because they're wrong. So there was a mistaken view that was popular certainly in the last half of the last century, that the difference was in what the two hemispheres did. In other words, we thought of them as machines. And we asked the obvious question of a machine, what do you do? And the answer came back, well, the left hemisphere seems to do language and reason, and the right hemisphere seems to do pictures and emotion. Over a period of a couple of decades, it became quite obvious that both hemispheres are involved in everything. So that is not true. Both hemispheres are involved in everything. So where does that leave us? Well, a lot of people assumed it meant that there couldn't be no differences. But hang on, the hemispheres are deeply divided, which, on the face of it, is an extraordinary waste of computing capacity if you tend to think of the brain as a computer. And it's not just our brains, all brains have this divided nature. They're asymmetrical in structure and function. And the band of fibers at the base of the brain, called the corpus callosum, which connects them, is very largely involved in inhibition. It is passing information to the other hemisphere, of course, but it's also sort of saying, you keep out of this while I deal with it. So it seems that there are differences. I don't think that could possibly be controversial. The question of what are those differences? And it turns out they're to do with attention. And when I first realized this, I didn't quite appreciate the full import of this because I was trained in a cognitive science tradition in which attention was simply another brain function. But it is not. Attention is. Is how you dispose consciousness towards the world and the way in which you do it alters what it is that you find. And the difference, in brief, is that the left hemisphere has evolved for the purpose of enabling us to get stuff quickly, precisely, and ingest it. It's largely to do with eating. And that requires a kind of narrowly focused attention to a detail in order to get it quickly and know that you've got it. Meanwhile, however, your brain has to be doing something else, which is entirely incompatible with it, which is why you need two neuronal masses, each capable of paying attention separately to the world. And that is to look out for predators. In other words, not to be eaten, to see predators, to take care of your mate and your offspring, and in other words, to take in the whole of the lived world and for that you need something quite different, the exact opposite of that. Narrowly focused attention targeted to a detail that you already know what it is. Instead, it is a broad, open, sustained vigilance on the lookout for things that we may not know what they are, but we need to be able to take them in. So those two kinds of attention produce different experiential worlds. One is just made up of bits and fragments that have no meaning. They're taken out of context, they're isolated, they're not connected with anything else. They're abstract, they're, they're categorical, they're non individual, non unique. And they're basically meaningless and frankly, inanimate. And I don't just mean that in a sort of popular parlance way. If you suppress the right hemisphere, you find that people see things they'd normally think of as alive, like their spouse, for example, as a machine. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is seeing a completely different world in which nothing is ever fixed and certain in the way that it is in the left hemisphere, in which things are massively interconnected, are changing and flowing and in process, not just fixed and static. They are things in which the bits that can't easily be put into words have life. That's a very important part, because everything that matters to us is implicit in this way. When we make things that give meaning to life explicit, we change their nature and we may completely destroy them. Sex, love, friendship, a sense of the divine, art, music, architecture, painting, poetry, myth, narrative, ritual, all these things have profound meaning. But if you ask me to state in a few words what it is, it comes crashing down to a nothing. I first realized this when I was teaching English in Oxford, that once you've taken the meaning in inverted commas out of the poem, you've got something completely different. You're left with a handful of dust. So those two. And by the way, the right hemisphere world is animate. So you've got these two different versions of the world. One is clearly the foundation of what to me is a morally and intellectually bankrupt position, that of reductive materialism, which misses just about everything of importance. And the other is a living, ensouled world, if you like. So those two ways of approaching the world, both are needed. We need to be able to manipulate and make precise something for certain purposes, but it should always be under the oversight of the far more intelligent, far more perceptive, far more attentive right hemisphere.
- [08:24]
Freddie
Would it be a useful analogy to think of it as a sort of zoom in telephoto lens, as the Left hemisphere and the kind of panoramic zoomed out lens as the right hemisphere. In which case, is it right that there are some aspects of truth that you can see in finer detail using your left hemisphere? And there are some aspects of truth that you can only witness kind of via the right hemisphere? I mean, is that a useful analogy or what's a better way of, of thinking about it in terms of perceiving truth?
- [09:00]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, I think it's okay that way, if you like it self focuses in on one aspect. I'm glad that we're already talking about truth because it's a topic that I think is not immediately understood in the mainstream. It's a very, very important question what we mean by truth. And there's certain kinds of truth that are very useful for architecture, building, machine, so on. You need to have the capacity to focus on something, measure it, and if it's not true, it won't fit. In fact, that's an expression that if you've ever heard or talked to a carpenter about surfaces, they're not true, meaning they don't fit together but perfectly, which they need to do. And for that you need this precisely targeted attention to detail. So there's nothing wrong with it. I mean, it's a very important thing to say. What the left hemisphere offers us is very valuable, but he should never become the master. It is only a useful servant, but
- [10:06]
Freddie
a necessary, it's a necessary component, it's a necessary tool.
- [10:12]
Ian McGilchrist
I was going to say Einstein himself said words to this effect. I mean, he didn't know he was talking about right and left hemisphere. But he said, you know, the rational mind is a faithful servant. The intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in a world that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift. Now that points us to something that I'd like to just take back for a moment to ancient Greece. So in the ancient Greek world, there were two words that were commonly used for truth. One was mythos, which is the origin muthos in ancient Greek. But anyway, mythos, which is the origin of our word mythology, and logos, which is the origin of our word logic. And they were thought of as two completely different kinds of truth. Much the greater was mythos. Mythos was the only way of being able to access profound truths. In other words, they couldn't be pinned down by a few observations, measurements, or a handful of words. They required something more like, well, I have to use this word gestalt. In other words, a whole that cannot be taken apart without loss of something essential to it. It cannot be analyzed. The left hemisphere thinks that the only way to understand something is to take it apart and see what it's made of. This seems reasonable, but up to a point, because as a whole it has other qualities and you need to see those. Now, mythos is a great kind of truth, which in our modern world has been equated with falsehood. So it's just a myth, we say. But for the Greeks, logos was useful in a court of law for deciding whether A owes B a certain sum of money on the basis of a contract or something like that. That worked very nicely. But mythos was the only way to understand the deep truths, the big truths. To take the word truth itself for a moment. I've already alluded to the idea of fitting something else, that the surfaces are true, as a carpenter says. But it's also in a much deeper sense, we can be true to a person or to an ideal, we say, and being true to it is not simply stating something that can be verified by a lawyer or a computer in some way, but actually stating a disposition towards it in which we plight our truth as the very old expression used to be when you married somebody. And that word troth is the same as truth. And the origins of this whole idea go back to one of fidelity, of a disposition towards something. So when I'm asked about the Christian religion, I say, well, look, it's the only one that has a very complex creed, as far as I'm aware, the only major religion that has this very complex creed which involves a lot of truth propositions. But I think that the attitude that is proper to a religion is a truth disposition, and that is a process. It involves all of you and it is never ending. And it is profoundly relational.
- [13:28]
Freddie
I want to come on, if we could, to the kind of Christian mythology specifically, but just to make sure that our audience is with us on the kind of foundations here. I just think it's worth exploring a little bit more this difference between mythos and logos. The idea that a myth may access truths that conceptual language cannot. Can you just give us examples of that or explain that a little bit more? Is the idea that a story, a myth or a story can somehow in its wholeness, connect you with something that conceptual language never could. What kind of truths are not accessible to logos that mythos can get us towards?
- [14:15]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, I suppose it would be easy to start with non verbal expressions of something that speaks to us profoundly. And there I would think of perhaps a painting by Giotto or any great artist whose work touches us Speaks to us, moves us. But if you ask me, what is it saying? I can't put that into language. So meaning is not just linguistic. If I say, my wife means everything to me, a person whose right hemisphere had been functionally ablated would say, oh, what does she mean? But that is not to understand the meaning of meaning. So meaning comes in different forms, but it can also be verbal. And this is the great strength of poetry. Poetry cannot be reduced, as I discovered when I was teaching English literature at Oxford, cannot be reduced to simple prosaic statements. You know, if you take an amazing poem by Thomas Hardy, the Self Unseeing, and say, what does it say? Well, it says that there are moments in life that are pregnant with meaning, but we don't seem to be aware of it at the time. Hello. But you know, if I begin to recite the poem, I won't recite it all. Here is the ancient floor, foot worn and hollowed and thin. Here was the former door where the dead feet walked in. Immediately you can feel that something is going on that you're aware of physically as well as intellectually that is moving you towards something. And, you know, I sometimes say that a play like King Lear depends not a whit on whether there really was a King Lear. I think there's evidence that there was, but the story is nothing like the one that Shakespeare tells. But in a way that's irrelevant because that play contains more truth about human life than any number of textbooks of biology. So there are different levels of truth. There's deep truths and great truths, which often contain an element of paradox. It's not for nothing that Niels Bohr, the perhaps founder of the whole field of quantum mechanics, modern physics, said that the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. So at the beginning of the last section, Part three of the Master and His Emissary, where I'm looking at what can we say then about the world that is more likely to be true than its opposite? I begin with the coincidence of opposites,
- [17:03]
Freddie
because this, I think, is actually a very radical concept that is not widely understood or talked about, which is sort of reclaiming the concept of truth for these harder to explain logically phenomena. And this central thing that we're talking about today, which is how myths can be true or how myths can bring you closer to truth, I think it's just one that people don't understand at all, really. As you say, myth is considered the opposite of truth. Would it be possible for myths to contain sort of factual untruths and still be true in the deeper and more important sense?
- [17:52]
Ian McGilchrist
Absolutely. Of course, they depend on different ways of thinking about the very idea of truth. The one doesn't depend on the other, but we've lost the idea that, you see, I mean, things like story is really just an emphatic, that is a shortened version of history. We take history to be true and stories to be false, but stories are just actually what we learn from history. And the word fable originally meant something worthy to be spoken. A legend was something worthy to be read. They have nowhere built into their history the idea they're untrue. This only happened in our language after the so called scientific revolution of the 17th century, the late 17th century.
- [18:39]
Freddie
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Richard Dawkins, who came on this show a couple of times and we tried to get into this and I was trying to push him on this. The idea that you could believe in something even up to and including things that were literally or factually untrue and still end up in some closer to truth than someone who rejected the whole story outright. And he completely just didn't come with me on that concept. So how. Give us an example of where that might be true. Are we saying even, for example, that the ancients, you know, the ancient Greeks, let's say, in their kind of complex web of mythology, which most likely, in fact probably, certainly did contain all sorts of literal untruths, if one is thinking of it only in that way still in some brought them closer to the truth of the cosmos than maybe we are today.
- [19:35]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, Greek myths have lasted into our world very, very much so. Certainly when I was growing up, one of the books I had by my bed when I went to stay with my grandparents, was Greek myths with extraordinary Victorian illustrations. But nonetheless the stories are profound and convey truth to this very day. Interestingly, they tended to think of their heroic figures as having a foot in this world and a foot in another world. They were often sometimes the offspring of a union between a God and a human and they had divine properties. And I think we, when we. I mean, let's just take one particular Greek myth, which I think is very important because it is about the nature of myth. Sounds a bit postmodern, but I don't think it is. I'm talking about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. You know, the story that Orpheus and Eurydice, after they were married, Eurydice was bitten by a poisonous snake and died and descended into the underworld. And Orpheus, who was this God of music, and which is a very interesting idea in itself, was moved to think that he could actually go into the underworld and use music to speak to the gods and let them give back his dear wife. And you know that the story is that he did. He played for the gods and the gods said, okay, we will release Eurydice back to the world to be with you, and she will follow you out of the underworld but on one condition, that you never look back at her until you're completely out of the underworld. And why? Well, I think it's a very interesting point that's being made, which is that if you look explicitly at her, you will shrink her into a left hemisphere reality, whereas you must hold her in this right hemisphere thing of trusting, a trusting relationship of faithfulness to everything that has gone on in this meeting in the underworld. And then you will achieve the truth of the union again with your wife. And you know the story that he was almost out, but was so excited he couldn't, couldn't help himself turn to look and Eurydice was dragged remorselessly off into the underworld again, never to be seen again. So I think this tells us about the nature of myths that they are, are these really important elements that cannot be looked at in that dissecting, denotative frame of mind that we need to be clear about this. I mean, in other words, Dawkins's frame of mind that let's get the facts right. I mean, was there really this person, you know, and so on. It doesn't matter who, whether there really was this person, because this story is completely independent of that. And I saw, it was rather depressing. I saw a clip of Dawkins talking to Jordan Peterson. It was most unenlightening because Dawkins kept saying, well, you know, did the Virgin Mary actually lie with a man or was this actually a virgin birth? And Peterson didn't want to say yes or no, really. And I understand why, because he was staying on a vision of what is true that didn't depend on, as it were, the facts of the case. Now, some people would say it does depend on the facts of the case. And I would suggest I understand why. And I don't want to disrespect them for taking that view. But I think there are areas on which being agnostic, remaining uncertain is more honorable than being certain. Either way, in other words, I can't be sure that the things that normally happen in everyday life are invariably the case. And some of the recent discoveries in the last hundred years of science would teach us that Some of the things that we think are obviously the case may not obviously be the case. And there are enough instances of things happening that appear to have a supernatural or I hate that word because it suggests that it's not actually natural. But we don't know the full extent of what is natural. But for example, near death experiences and so forth. Also terminal lucidity and other things which suggest that there's more going on than we actually know. And I think you know that I'm not prepared to say this could not be true. But I'm also not interested in the end, in whether it is true in that way or not. Because for me, mythos is a much bigger truth than logos ever could be. The facts of the case are the icing on the cake, but the cake is there anyway. So I say, I think in my chapter on the sense of the sacred that the truth of the Christian mythos is so great that why would the, as it were, the logos of it not be true as well? I can't say that it was not
- [24:59]
Financial Advisor
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- [25:52]
Podcast Host
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- [26:37]
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- [27:55]
Freddie
There's a kind of conceptual idea that with the Orpheus and Eurydice comparison, that by looking at something directly and trying to delineate it, describe it and categorize it, you destroy it. It goes, you then can't see it at all. So you're suggesting there's almost a whole category of true things that can never be accessed via a left brain mechanism, that if one approaches them literally, you just won't get any closer to them. And therefore, yeah, a life lived with the left brain as your dominant lens will overall be less close to truth, not closer to it.
- [28:38]
Ian McGilchrist
Absolutely. No question. Whatever. The left hemisphere on its own is prone to delusion. And I don't just mean in the popular parlance idea of a delusion, I mean technically. So that in the matter of things I look at, I don't know, it's about 20, 25 of the most bizarre, almost unbelievable neuropsychiatric syndromes in which people are grossly deluded. And for a lot of people, I think it would be mind bogglingly interesting just to see these are Real people thinking these things only because there's a problem with their right hemisphere. Because in those 25, whatever it is, syndromes, in only one case is it not true that the syndrome depends on largely damage to the right hemisphere or only damage to the right hemisphere, not the left. So the left is not anywhere near reality. And this is borne out by the work of Antonio Damasio that people may have come across. He gives a very vivid example of a man who had a right frontal lobe tumor, I think, or at any rate an insult, a neurological insult of some kind. And he had to build the world up, as it were, from first logical principles. And not only did it take him forever to arrive at any kind of conclusion, but he reached some very foolish conclusions, conclusions for an intelligent man. So relying on the left hemisphere to guide you towards truth is never going to be a good plan. The left hemisphere is a servant. It has a tool to offer which under certain circumstances is useful. But the decision about where it is useful must depend on the right hemisphere. And I just want to say this, the right hemisphere not only attends better and perceives better, but it makes much more sound judgments on the basis of what it has seen and perceived and attended to. And it is also not only socially and emotionally more intelligent, but actually cognitively more intelligent than the left hemisphere. Why would you want to dig yourself into that particular way of looking at the world in the hope of getting anywhere near truth?
- [30:58]
Freddie
I just want to try and represent the view of those kinds of people. Steven Pinker is another name that comes to mind. He's also been on this show a few times. He wrote a book called Rationality why We Need It. And we were discussing that and I
- [31:11]
Ian McGilchrist
think, well, we do need it.
- [31:12]
Freddie
Well, we do it.
- [31:12]
Ian McGilchrist
It's not a problem. We do.
- [31:13]
Freddie
I think I got him to admit during that conversation that intuition exists and plays a role. And both, to be fair, both Dawkins and Steven Pinker are people who can talk lyrically about music, love and the kind of non logical aspects of life. So it's not like they are, are blind to them. But I think their anxiety, if they were listening to this conversation and from the kind of worldview you have, might be that the gains of the Enlightenment, the advances we have made from our emphasis on rationality and logic, are in danger at the moment anyway by a kind of regression of science, an increase of dangerous superstition, and people like Iain McGilchrist going off on YouTube telling people that it's okay to believe myths, even if they're not really literally true is only encouraging this dangerous tendency. And they probably quite anxious about it. What would you say back to them?
- [32:15]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, I would say, gosh, as I find myself saying almost in everything that I have to talk about, choose a knot of the kind that you think 100%. There are a number of different truths, and they need to be in order to have an intelligent understanding, let alone to approach wisdom, one needs to be able to hold them and not lose one because you hold to another. Now, I've written three long chapters on science and three long chapters on reason. In the matter with things extolling. These are very important ways of arriving at an understanding of the world, but not on their own. They need supplementation by two other paths, intuition and imagination. And of course, they say, well, you know, intuition, where's the security in that? Where's the security in imagination? It can lead us astray. But I can demonstrate that reason can easily lead you astray. In fact, as GK Chesterton, I think very wisely said about madness, that the madman is not somebody who's lost his reason, as we say, but somebody who's lost everything but their reason. And, you know, if I'm sitting in this room and I hear a voice and I look around and there's nobody there, I think rationally, I think, so how does this voice get into the room? I know there's that plug socket down there is the only point of ingress into this room. So that somebody must have been able to wire into that part of the circuitry, and it would have to be the neighbors, and they're speaking to me. Now, that is not irrational, but of course it's rubbish. And unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly. Science also is inevitably the history of mistakes. In fact, there is a philosophical position called pessimistic meta induction, which just holds that science is the story of the perpetually mist. That's a very negative way of thinking of it because, of course, it's something that is constantly getting nearer towards truth. Now, that idea of a process that is getting nearer and of clearing away things that are untrue, which is actually the mode of science, it is apophatic. I mean, people like Pinker and Dawkins would throw a wobbly if I said that, because they don't understand what's meant by the apophatic path towards the divine. In other words, the clearing away of what is not true in order to allow what is there to shine forth. And I think that's a very important way of thinking about our progress. So those are the sort of things I would say that I don't think that I'm against reason and truth, don't think that I disrespect the Enlightenment. If I'd been alive at the time, I would have undoubtedly have gone along with the swim of the period, because it was very difficult then to see the very obvious limitations to that which became clearer during the 19th century.
- [35:31]
Freddie
So you're not one of these people who rejects the Enlightenment wholesale and wishes it had never happened because we come across those people as well.
- [35:40]
Ian McGilchrist
No, I don't think so. I think that it did a necessary job at a moment in time. I mean, it's slightly like, and I think goes hand in hand with. Because both were left hemisphere inspired movements. The Reformation. People detect from what I wrote in the Master and His Emissary that I'm not a huge admirer of the Reformation. But that is not to say that it didn't affect some rather important sort of cleansing of the Augean stables that needed to happen. Unfortunately, it brought with it a sort of headstrong left hemisphere view that now we're in the clear. Everything must be made explicit, everything must be held, the word triumphs over the image and so on. Well, you see, the trouble with the left hand is if I can anthropomorphize it, but after all it is part of a human being, so why not anthropomorphize it? It tends to be headstrong, it tends to think it knows far more than it does, and that's simply a function of its understanding and knowing very little. It's the so called Dunning Kruger effect. But that it's just a dignified piece of common knowledge to anybody who's lived a while, the people who least seem to be most certain about what they know. And I think the more you know, the less certain you become about these things. So I don't mind at all being held up as an example of somebody who is uncertain because I think that there is greater wisdom in some uncertainties than there is in certainties about them.
- [37:10]
Freddie
I guess the bit of the Pinker Dawkins anxiety that I would share is how do you rehabilitate the right brain capacities and rehabilitate the importance of myth without somehow regressing to a medieval or prior world in which, along with a whole bunch of important true things, most ordinary people believe a whole load of garbage that is not neither helpful nor true. That's the conundrum, isn't it? How can One, keep the good aspects of the enlightenment, but strengthen the right hemisphere.
- [37:46]
Ian McGilchrist
I think one thing I'd say is awareness. I think that awareness is the key to wisdom. And when we're not aware of things, and I'm afraid Dawkins and Pinker and co appear not to be aware of certain things, then you tend to adopt positions that are only partially true. And I think that the answer to how do we bring back the right hemisphere? Is not a four point or eight point plan, because that itself is a very left hemisphere way of thinking, that there is a series of steps we can take which will make sure that we've got this right. There is risk entailed in it, but there is risk entailed in the positions adopted by the hardline atheists and reductionists. But they just don't see it. They're not aware of that risk. So being aware of the risk is very, very important. And to blind yourself to the risks is a mistake. So you're quite right to advert to the fact that there could be dangers involved here. But I think what I'm indicating is an attitude, a disposition which is the ground of eventually, if one lives long enough and learns from life, a degree of wisdom. And I certainly don't see Dawkins and Pinker as exemplifying wisdom. No, not at all.
- [39:29]
Freddie
Let's come on, if we could, to the Christian myth, because you've written a lot about that recently, including here at Unherd. You say that Christianity is, I believe, the greatest of all myths. A word I use without any implication that it is not true, indeed quite the opposite. When did you come to that view about the Christian myth?
- [39:51]
Ian McGilchrist
In my teens I hadn't really come across it in its full story at all because my, my family were not religious at all. And then in my teens I did partly through religious music, which I think is, speaks deeply to me, partly through the words of the divine service, through the story, the mist of Christ. This may sound rather unorthodox to some Christians, but through the very closeness to nature that I felt that I felt nature was speaking to me and I felt this music was speaking to me and I felt that the ritual was speaking to me. And I, you know, people say, what do you mean speaking to you? What was it saying? But I think that's rather like the person who said my wife means everything to me. What does it mean? I think the important point to take away from the idea of something speaking is that there was an invitation to engage in a dialogue, in a sort of dialogical relationship. And it's out of that relationship, not the pinning of it down, which the left hand mistake wants prematurely to do, but the leaving it open for the moment so that you can actually begin to understand the full nature of what it is you are encountering. And that process is never ending. And it certainly hasn't ended in me. And I'm not putting myself forward as somebody who can help because I have a strong faith or anything like that, but I would. It sounds a bit dramatic, but I would, as it were, go to my death for the fact that there is something very, very profound in the Christian story which I wouldn't wish to gain, say. And it has nothing to do for me with the literal historic Christ. I have very good friends who respect their position, who think it does matter very much, and I can see their point of view. I prefer to remain, if I may, agnostic on that. But it doesn't in any way for me diminish the allegiance I feel towards it. And that is what faith is, isn't it? Faith means allegiance. It's rather like that idea of truth as being true to something. And I hope that I try my best not to be untrue to it, whatever that means.
- [42:28]
Freddie
So would you now describe yourself as a Christian?
- [42:31]
Ian McGilchrist
You see the problem is.
- [42:33]
Freddie
Or is that the left brained question?
- [42:36]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, I fear it could be. And I know that people may think, well, what on earth is he talking about? But the trouble is that I made the mistake, I think of saying in an interview that has been widely viewed on the Internet with my friend Daniel Seth by Justin Brearley. I said, well, I don't know about whether I'm a Christian or not, but I sort of feel I ought to. I said, fess up and say I am a Christian. What I meant there is my real answer to that is complex and long winded and heads round with caveats. But at the end of the day, the thing is so important to me that why don't I say I am a Christian? But I immediately regretted it because then a thing goes up. Dr. Ian McGilchrith confesses he is a Christian. And suddenly I'm invited by all kinds of religious outfits to talk about this in a way which it is not faithful and not true to me it betrays something that I still hold to, but I don't like it articulated in that very brutal way.
- [43:47]
Freddie
So to kind of evangelize or proselytize would be opposite to how you feel about it?
- [43:55]
Ian McGilchrist
Absolutely right. That is what I do not wish to do. Or be. And I sometimes think that if Christianity wanted to reach people in a secular world, in the urban, modern, secular world, rather than have people with placards and megaphones in the streets, which would put me off right away, I think, oh God, am I really anything to do with this? No, please. Would be to move small groups of monastics into places in a town center where they had a church of a kind that had open doors and they said the offices and sang the offices and were prepared to speak to people who dropped in if they wanted to be spoken to, but not harangued. And it's by that gentle approach that I was drawn into Christianity, by the gentle approach of the poets, not by the haranguings of philosophers. One thing that's interesting is that people imagine, and this is behind the excitement, that here's somebody who obviously is deeply indebted to and educated in science, who is prepared to say he's a Christian. This is by no means of novelty. And the thing that really, I think people should know is the research on Nobel Prize winners. So these are the most prestigious scientists of the last 100 whatever years, and in the year 2001, a survey of the last century, because they started in 1900 of Nobel Prize winners and many aspects of their beliefs. And one was their belief in God or otherwise. And they were asked if at any time in their life they had been an atheist or even an agnostic. And in the world of the literature, Nobel winners, 35% of them said that they had been atheists and were atheists or agnostics. But when you come to science, it's very, very much lower. So when you come to biology, it's something like 8.9%. When you come to chem, something like 7 point something percent. And in the case of physicists, what I would consider the most scientifically based of all scientists, it's 4.7% only. That means that over 95% of all the Nobel Prize winners in physics very clearly believed in a God. And that's no surprise to me, because I've read the works, I've read the books, listened to the lectures or heard the lectures, read the lectures of the great physicists of the last century. And it's very clear that they do think that it is entirely compatible with their scientific faith that there is a God. The trouble with Pinker and Dawkins is that they are biologists. And biologists until recently have been very much mechanists. Thank God that is now passing. So it is no longer possible for Dawkins to think of us as lumbering robots doing the bidding of our genes. We know far too much about the development of an organism that is simply not compatible with that view. And at last, something of the view that was accepted in physics already 100 years ago is beginning to be accepted in the life sciences. Most notably, I think of the work of I'm sure he wouldn't want to be called religious or non religious, but of Mike Levin. He has put forward the idea that there are form fields which guide the evolution of the organism and draw it from in front if you like, rather than simply pushing it from behind in the sort of hydraulic mechanistic model that has dominated biology until about 15 or 20 years ago.
- [47:50]
Freddie
You can discover more of these kind of conversations with an Unherd digital subscription. You get 12 weeks of unlimited digital access to unmissable articles from all of our writers such as Kathleen Stark, Glenn Lowry, Wolfgang Munschau, Yanis Varoufakis, and many more for just £12. As a subscriber, you can also watch exclusive weekly events here at the Unherd Club and read more in depth subscriber only investigations and deep dives. Not only that, we'll send you a free limited edition JG Fox Illustrated mug which features a a punk protesting against offensive speech, which I hope you notice is ironically capturing our mission here at Unherd, which is to serve as a home for those still willing to speak their minds. Go to unherd.com podcast to claim this offer. Now you've talked a little bit more politically or a little bit more broadly about what a religious revival might accomplish. You say in your recent essay for Unherd, if this civilization is to be saved, presumably that means the Western civilization. But you can tell us, and we all know, how urgent that need is. There must be more, nothing less, than a return to the place of the Christian tradition at the core of life, daily life. That sounds quite a kind of radical program. Would you explain it to our listeners and viewers?
- [49:17]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, first of all, I do mean the civilization of the west, and I say, and we all know how important that is for two reasons. One is that whatever you think of a civilization, when it collapses, all kinds of unbelievable evils will follow. It turns into a situation in which might is right and the most vulnerable will go to the wall, and all kinds of unspeakable atrocities would follow. The downfall of a civilization is not a pretty spectacle. But I also mean more than that we live in a binary kind of world. Coming back again to what I'm constantly complaining about that there are more than one side to any story. And at the moment it's fashionable to talk about the evils that may have come from Western civilization. And interestingly, when I was thinking, writing and talking some 40 years ago, I would have aligned myself with those who had plenty of criticisms to make of the civilization of the west because they can be made and should be made. But now I think things have, as they tend to do, swung far too far. And can I say to anybody listening to me here, could you please take on board that when I put forward a point of view, it doesn't mean I think it is the only point of view. I think it is a much needed corrective. So now I think it is very important to point to the great things that have come out of Western civilization. And not all of them, but many of them are due to the impact that Christianity had on that culture. And it's only now that Christianity is even the implicit sort of Christianity that seemed to be baked into the fabric of Western thinking is falling away that we realize how important those things were. Things like tolerance, indeed compassion, an element of humility rather than hubris and so forth. So these things, I think the sense of wonder, the sense of the limitations to our knowledge, in other words, humility, however clever, knowledgeable and so on we may get to be, and the place of compassion for those who disagree with us, these things need to be deeply rooted in our lives. And I would say what I'm not saying, of course, I'm immediately misunderstood as meaning something that I personally find distasteful, which is a sort of militant Christianity. I'm not talking about that at all. And I don't know how it can happen. But I do believe that sometimes quiet revolutions take place, that quiet miracles are indeed much more effective than noisy confrontations. And so I would like to make a bid for people again adopting practices that bring Christianity back into the field of everyday life. Now, in some ways that means not abandoning it from our education. I think that would be a mistake because I think you need to know what it is you're rejecting, if you decide to reject it. And without education you don't.
- [52:57]
Freddie
So that would mean, just to be clear then, for example, in schools, making sure that morning prayers, hymns, school services, those kinds of things should be part of the program.
- [53:08]
Ian McGilchrist
They were parts of my life. I don't think they did me any harm. And I think they embedded something in me that has been able to grow. So, yes, I would recommend that I would also be perfectly willing to listen to the arguments of those who say that it's a desirable move. So I'm not being doctrinaire because my foe is the doctrinaire and the dogmatic. The place of Christian, explicitly Christian ideas in our debates about the things that matter to us, about society, about politics and so on, is also an important element. I mean, some people would say, no, it's very important that no such thing should be there. And I think I understand why they say that. But I think that what they don't realize is that the risk that they run is something that is not this beautiful, perfect enlightenment ideal unsullied by religion, but something that is actually simplistic, debased, antagonistic, and we're already seeing it evolving and very vocal in the socio political sphere. So those things. But also, if I could just press
- [54:24]
Freddie
you on that a little bit because. Because there is a sense that Christianity is coming back into politics. Obviously. We get images of Donald Trump sitting behind the Oval office desk with 24 pastors placing their hands on him and praying for him. We've had comparisons between him and Christ and all the rest of it. So something is going on in America.
- [54:46]
Ian McGilchrist
Yeah, but look, a good idea can be perverted. It doesn't stop it being a good idea. Trump is, I think it's hardly news to say he's a malignant narcissist. And if it suits him to be surrounded by pastors and so on laying their hands on him, then okay, I must say I didn't like that image. And I thought, I wonder what the pastors thought would be made of it. In their defense, they probably said, well, it's most important that we do whatever we can in spiritual terms to make sure that the president of our country is given all the religious help, the help of the Holy Spirit and so on. But I'm afraid I have grave doubts about all of that.
- [55:36]
Freddie
If that's the bad version, what might the good version of a kind of renaissance?
- [55:40]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, it's certainly not bigging up one person as being an example of something of Christ. Good Lord, words fail me. Look, he was also, by the way, just recently on the White House balcony or terrace or whatever it is with the east of Bunny talking about the situation in Iran. I mean, good God.
- [56:01]
Financial Advisor
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- [56:55]
Ian McGilchrist
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Ian McGilchrist
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Ian McGilchrist
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Ian McGilchrist
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- [57:51]
Freddie
Let me ask would you want politicians? Because this is where it gets really hard, I think. I think to to feel like that society may be healthier if Christianity had a more comfortable and bigger place in it is one thing. But then when you start to spell it out, do you want politicians to talk about religion?
- [58:11]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, you see, the thing is that once this is one of the problems with having done away with religion in public life is that then you either have to live with that or face the concept of explicitly reintroducing it. And was a great deal of wisdom in its implicit presence there. And now that we've got rid of it, we've lost the opportunity to have it there in the way I would like it to be. Now I don't. I can honestly say, I don't know. It's not something I've really put a lot of thought into. I'm an absolutely apolitical beast about how this would work. I think there are dangers in anything that smacked of proselytizing, but I Think an acceptance of Christian forms in the political world.
- [59:02]
Freddie
I mean, you might say we have that here in the United Kingdom. I mean, we have bishops in the legislature, we have established.
- [59:09]
Ian McGilchrist
I don't know for how long. I mean, I think that's one of the things that they want to get rid of. So I don't know. But what I was going to say is there are ways of bringing it back into daily life which I like very much. And I've seen them in Buddhist countries and I know about them from Orthodox and Catholic countries and I only know about them at second hand in Judaism. But these are small sanctifying prayers at simple moments in the daily routine. At, well, the one that somehow by the skin of its teeth hangs on is the saying of grace before breaking bread. But also things like lighting a light at the end of the day, running water for animals or for plants. These things, the idea of blessing, sanctifying these moments of connection with something very real embodied that embeds us again in a sacred cosmos. These are. They may sound very superficial and that again I understand, but I think that sometimes one has to embrace these things to bring back into our world the possibility of such a way of thinking. See, this is something that is at the center of talking about God at all. Is that in the chapter on the Sense of the Sacred, I think I don't even mention God for about 30 pages. And that's because I feared that as soon as I uttered the word God, all kinds of preconceptions would come into people's minds that would stop them hearing what I'm saying. And I think in order to be true to what I take to be God, I had to hold back a bit on that. So you're speaking to somebody who is all too aware of the possibilities of getting things wrong by being over explicit, but also aware that just by remaining silent I can't get anywhere. So how do I, in a world that is essentially very left hemisphere dominated, crude wants to pin things down and so on. How do I make the case? And all I'd say is that I think I have made that case. When I was in my teens, I imagined that after a spell at Oxford, I would go into a monastery because it seemed so important to me to devote myself to understanding these truths that seem to me the most profound truths still seem to me the most profound truths. And I probably wouldn't have reached many people by that route. But simply by including the chapter called the Sense of the Sacred. It's a very long chapter. I think it's 112 pages. I have reached so many people, people of all faiths or none write to me very often saying things like I never understood what was meant by religious belief or God, but having read you, I now understand what it's about and I feel I need to engage myself with it and to learn more. I've had people who've written to me from different faiths saying I lost my faith, but in reading you I rediscovered it. I've had people who are priests or monks in different religious traditions, not just Christianity, write to me to say similar things.
- [62:37]
Freddie
Concluding question for you. The impression I have and we on this channel talk to people, as it were, from both the political sphere and also the sphere of thoughts and philosophy. And you begin to notice that there is this quite widespread and probably uncontroversial intuition that somehow we have gone too far in what you would call a left brain direction. Some of our intuitions and sense of what is good and true about the world has been forgotten or blotched. And I don't think, I think most people would agree with that. What always gets difficult and it's almost like an intrinsic problem is that when you start moving those ideas into the political realm or you start trying to create a program for reintroducing them because politics is so combative and ultimately is dominated by ambitious, big egoed people who ultimately want to wield force. It's a bit like your Orpheus looking back at Eurydice. All of the goodness of those ideas somehow gets lost. That's the paradox we have that there's an almost, I would say very widespread sense that something big needs to happen, but we lack the mechanism to deliver it.
- [63:55]
Ian McGilchrist
Yeah, I agree with that. And it is always the moment that I least look forward to is so what do we do? And I imagine if I say, well, we need to be, we don't need more power, we need more wisdom. How do we get wisdom? And I imagine them saying, I know we'll set up a committee that meets every two weeks and we'll have a mission statement and we'll define what we mean by wisdom and we'll lay out the steps and we'll see, monitor our progress. And of course that is the exact opposite of wisdom. This is the problem. But I do think there are ways and I think that, see this is so important. We think we make it happen. And I want to suggest, no, we stop things happening and if we get out of the way, things may happen. This is really a daoist vision that the DAO knows where it's going. And we can either go with the dao or we can resist the movement of the dao and we can try and pin it down. And famously, the Dao Te Ching opens the remark. Get that, Dawkins. The dao that can be named is not the real dao. So it's no good having a conversation of that kind. So what I think is happening is that we have catastrophically got in the way of the dao. We have got in the way of the movement, in a Christian sense, of the divine, the sacred, perhaps the Holy Spirit moving in the world. And to me, this brings back the image of the gardener. The gardener has no idea how a plant becomes a plant and certainly can't make a plant. All it can do is tend the plant by clearing away things that will strangle it and stifle it and nourishing it and leaving it. Can't force it forward to become, I want that flower tomorrow. You have to wait for that flower to come at the time when that flower comes. Now, I think there is a great deal of hope in this image, and I do have hope. I know that I do sound pessimistic, and I am. I call myself a hopeful pessimist. And that's not as odd as it sounds. I think if you look at the way things are going, it's hard not to see that things are bad. And I think actually not seeing that they are bad would be a problem in itself. So being fully aware, square on what we're facing and the bad things that could happen is number one. Number two is getting the hell out of the out of the way in such a way as to allow. And I don't mean in a passive way. So, for example, in the Eastern tradition that I so much admire, and really honestly, the Chinese, Korean, Indian and Japanese traditions, to me hold colossal wisdom. So although I may call myself a Christian, I'm certainly not close to those in the slightest. In those traditions, there is something called non doing, and there is also unknowing. And these are not ignorance or laziness, as I sometimes say. Ignorance is what comes before knowing, and unknowing is what comes afterwards, if you're lucky and wise enough to achieve it. And non doing is also not just being. Well, I don't know, let's see what's on the telly. It's a conscious awareness, and very much it requires a discipline of attention, which is for me, imaged in meditation and prayer, that these are openings of. Of the mind, shutting down monkey Mind which is busy telling me all the things that it thinks it knows and will solve the problem. And allowing something to speak to me. Now, I think if enough people adopted this approach and were true to it, something will emerge. I really strongly believe that. And one practical way of thinking about this is the idea of my friend Dougald Heine at work in the ruins. The idea there is that if civilization collapses, what we need is centers from which something living can be seeded. Something like the role that the monasteries played in the Dark Ages. And so small communities that are of a size where people actually know enough of their fellow members of the community to be able to trust them, to share lives with them, to share meals with them, to help one another when they need help, to worship together, to hold common ideals and values. And that these things would be very strong and would speak to people. And people would visit them and think, you know, I'd like to join. And after a certain point you say, well, no, but can you go and start another one of these? Now, if that happened, I think that very soon we would have something that would spread and grow across a large area. We think too much in big blocks that it's got to start from the center, like a big turnaround. And I agree with you. There are many problems with that. And you. You eloquently put some of those to me. But I think I'm talking about a sort of ground upwards thing. And the ultimate case of that is start with yourself. You are not asked to solve all the problems of the world, of course not. But you do have particular responsibility for one thing that nobody else has responsibility for, which is you and your soul and growing your soul. And that is what we are here for. This is a veil of soul making, as Keats, who really was wise at the age of 26, said. And that I strongly believe. And it is a matter of growing your soul, not stunting it. And so it's a matter of cultivating openness. What George Steiner calls an attitude of audition. In other words, listening. Listening for the things that are there speaking to you. All my life I have known this, I've heard these things. And I can't tell you what they say, but I do know they engage me in a relationship. And it's that relationship out of which things grow. Not out of things, but out of relationships. When I said what matters is awareness. If we had awareness of this way of thinking, as well as awareness of what is wrong with the way we're thinking now, I think things would change very rapidly. I mean, I'm prepared to stick my neck out and say that if enough people, and it might only be 2% of the population started to think like this and talk like this, that we could see things turn around in a matter of a decade. Maybe we haven't got a decade, but I'm hoping that we have in a decade's time. There would be distinct differences in the way public discourse went on, a sophistication of the way that people talk about what we are, what we're doing here, what the world is way beyond the Pinkerian, the Dawkinsian bankrupt vision of simply random movement of meaningless matter.
- [71:12]
Freddie
Ian McGilchrist, we have run out of time, but as always, it's a huge pleasure and so much to think about there. I feel like we're gonna have to invite Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on to defend themselves after we've spoken about them in absentia. But a huge pleasure. And before we go, you are actually about to do a multiple day lecture in Oxford, which people can come to if they are around. Tell us about that.
- [71:35]
Ian McGilchrist
Yes. Okay, so it's a two day event. We've taken over the Sheldonian Theatre in the middle of Oxford. It's the 2nd and 3rd of May, a Saturday and a Sunday, and the theme is the good, the beautiful and the true. And as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing more important to talk about than those great virtues. I see them as again, things that we are not as aware of as we need to be, that we are not cognizant of, we don't appreciate, are speaking to us, calling to us, not pushing us in the way that we imagine. Everything happens mechanically but are acting as attractors. And we need to need to re embody the idea of these things as powerful attractors.
- [72:25]
Freddie
What we'll do is put a link to that event underneath in the description, so if people are interested, they can follow it. Ian McGilchrist, thank you so much.
- [72:34]
Ian McGilchrist
Oh, thank you, Freddie. It's been a great pleasure.
- [72:38]
Freddie
That was Dr. Ian McGilchrist, a friend of the show, I'm proud to say. Someone whose thinking is so deep and so broad and leaves you asking more questions. But I think a lot of what he said there will be resonate leaves us. Yeah, lots of food for thought for the next time we can persuade him to come on. In the meantime, thanks to Ian and thanks to you for tuning in. This was unheard.
- [73:08]
Financial Advisor
Let me ask a simple question. What happens if the market drops sharply just a few years before retirement? For many people that would mean 30 years of work and saving suddenly exposed to a single market cycle cycle. Yet most retirement portfolios remain almost entirely tied to paper assets, stocks, bonds and funds. What many investors don't realise is that physical gold can actually be held inside certain retirement accounts. That's something I recently learned more about through Augusta Precious Metals. Their educators explain how gold IRAs work, how funds can move from an existing IRA or 401k, and how physical gold is stored and regulated within the system. If you'd like to understand how that works, Augusta has created a free guide explaining the structure of gold IRAs. You can visit learngoldira.com to download the guide or text unherd to 35052 and they'll send it to you.
- [74:00]
Podcast Host
Leadership used to mean having all the answers, but today's best leaders embody a more human approach. I'm Jack Myers. And I'm Tim Spengler. Tim and I have spent our careers inside media marketing, marketing and culture and we partnered with the ACAST Creator Network to start Lead Human to answer one simple question. What does it really look like to lead in this AI dominated world? The biggest tip for being a creator? It's a job. What I learned from Michael Jackson Here's a man who understands precision. It's about answering the questions that are hard, not about answering a bunch of teed up questions that are fake. What we're looking for are real stories and practical advice that you can use with your teams right away. Subscribe to Lead Human with Jack Meyers and Tim Spengler wherever you get your podcasts. If you work in University maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all the list delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.