The Middle Way Society was founded to promote the study and practice of The Middle Way. The Middle Way is the idea that we make better judgements by avoiding fixed beliefs and being open to practical experience. We challenge unhelpful distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion, religion and secularism or arts and sciences. Though our name is inspired by some of the insights of the Buddha, we are independent of Buddhism or any other religion. We seek to promote and support integrative practice, overcoming conflict of all kinds.
Our guest today is Andy West, a senior specialist and training officer at the Philosophy Foundation. He has written for the Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and Lino amongst others. For the past several years he has taught philosophy in prisons and he’s here today to talk to us about his first book ‘The Life Inside: A memoir of prison, family and philosophy
By David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin, 2021).
Review by Robert M. Ellis
This extraordinary new book is an extended implicit application of the Middle Way, as well as a highly innovative mould-breaking theory of history. Its authors (one now deceased) are an archaeologist and an anthropologist respectively, who were struck by the increasing misfit between the gathering evidence of complexity in the early history of human beings, and the dogmatic assumptions through which it was being routinely interpreted. One of those dogmas is Hobbesian – that life for earlier humans before the state evolved, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and the other, opposed set of assumptions stems from Rousseau – that early humans were noble savages and we have declined into a sick civilization. The thing I found most striking and inspiring about this book straight away, then, is that engages in the two phase critique of the Middle Way rather than a reactive flip, following the complexity of the evidence and seeking new ways of interpreting it that do it justice. The result, too, is an inspiring theory that provides a source of hope – that is, that the historical evidence shows that humans do not inevitably have to adopt top-down ways of thinking and living their lives, but are clearly capable of living together in ways that are much more open, consultative, democratic, and ‘free’ in the concrete ways that actually matter.
At the same time as putting forward this inspiring and ground-breaking historical theory, this book synthesises an impressively wide range of evidence from all of early world history: including evidence of Paleolithic life from around the globe, and discussions particularly of Sumeria, Egypt, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Amongst the epiphanies for me regarding the Americas were that there were non-Aztec Republics in Mesoamerica, that the Native American groups around the Great Lakes had very sophisticated ways of reaching decisions through discussions (giving no real power to chiefs), and that the Native American groups in the north-west and in what is now California had totally contrasting social systems that constantly played off in reaction to each other: self-indulgent slave-holders versus ascetic egalitarians.
Graeber and Wengrow argue, with constant reference to very varied evidence, that the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ actually took 300 years, and had nothing inevitable about it, being sometimes deliberately ignored or reversed. They also argue that when agriculture did start to support cities, this did not immediately mean that they had to be organized in a top-down authoritarian fashion. Irrigation, for instance, was often managed co-operatively, and the evidence seems to be that many early cities were organized by citizens’ councils rather than by kings. When the harsh rule of kings did occur later, it was often initially developed elsewhere, in the highlands, rather than the cereal-cultivating river valleys. Many of the distinctive characteristics of particular cultures, including the technologies, forms of rule, and ways of life they adopted, were not due to an inevitable ascent on an evolutionary ladder towards the modern world, but rather in a ‘schismogenetic’ response to neighbouring groups that they wanted to differentiate themselves from.
I finished this book generally slightly more sympathetic to two kinds of views that I have previously considered naive: one being anarchism, in the sense of the conviction that humans could manage without the ‘state’ as we currently understand it, and the other being the view that Native North American groups have a superior insight (compared to cultures originating in Europe) as to how to live in harmony with their environment. What made the difference is simply the amount of evidence that challenged my previous assumptions. Whatever the practical difficulties of recapturing that situation, it seems clear that people in the past have lived effectively without the current authority and bureaucratic power that we currently associated with the ‘state’. The assumption that we always had to have the state in this form began to seem to me an unnecessarily top-down assumption – the application of a dogma that didn’t actually fit the evidence. Similarly, with the view of Native Americans that I’d previously regarded as an idealization, I can now see that there is actually a lot of good evidence that supports the view that they lived (not perfectly, but) in better harmony with their environment than we have managed (at least in the eastern and central parts of North America). This is particularly, it seems, because they developed a state-like urban civilization at Cahokia and associated sites, but then consciously abandoned it, leaving behind river-valley farming and consciously limiting their numbers to those that could be supported by hunting, gathering, and a little small-scale gardening.
Sacred cows of history are systematically slaughtered throughout this book. You may reconsider your view, not only of all the issues I have already mentioned, but of the origins of farming, the role of women, the origins of ideologies of liberation in the West (which seem to owe a lot to the critique offered by Native Americans), the pivotal role of ‘civilizations’, and the origins of kingship. If there’s an assumption about human history you don’t yet realize you have, this book will make you re-examine it. Personally, I’ve found it immensely valuable to provide a new perspective on aspects of the book I’m currently writing, which is called ‘A Systemic History of the Middle Way’, and incorporates cultural history along with biology and developmental psychology. The Middle Way is a response to absolutization, and one can hardly trace the history of one in any sense without the other. What this book has helped me to do most is to make a clear case that there is no inevitability about absolutization: one can see this in its social expression as power hierarchies as well as in the development of human psychologies. We did not adopt power hierarchies with their attendant dogmas as a matter of course with agriculture and urbanization, any more than we must inevitably adopt metaphysics as a necessary set of assumptions in our thinking. It may seem just as unthinkable to be without either – but all you have to do is to consider the evidence, and open your mind to new possible interpretations of it.
We are not locked into the power-relationships that have brought us the current world crises, any more than we are necessarily locked into the absolute beliefs that are used to justify those power relationships. There are always grounds for hope, because we can always start to adopt the Middle Way of judgement in response to whatever particular set of conditions start to confront us, however many previous mistakes we have made. Now I see further grounds for hope, too, after reading this book: in the past, people have thought and acted in all sorts of ways that we now may consider unthinkable, yet for those people they were normal. We should never limit our understanding of what is possible.
A Review of ‘Regenesis’ by George Monbiot (Allan Lane, 2022)
A combination of groundedness, breadth of awareness, balance and a sense of urgency is required to address the highly complex, critical and contested issues around the multiple eco-crisis we are facing. I have been following George Monbiot’s writings for many years, and in 2019 had the privilege of taking part in a podcast interview with him about rewilding. During that time he has only grown into these qualities. His most evident quality as a journalist is his commitment to drawing public attention to the abuses of the rich and powerful, that not only trash the environment but also deny justice to the poor. However, many left-wing journalists are prone to over-simplifying complex issues and getting drawn into tribal one-dimensionality. Monbiot is not. His background in zoology has equipped him with a strong awareness of systems, and of the inter-relationships we all depend on. The fire is always there, but he also examines the science carefully, considers counter-arguments, and references everything assiduously, whilst also producing highly readable prose – no mean achievement. His new book, ‘Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet’ is an exceptional achievement, on a topic of vast importance, that I have been sufficiently impressed by to want to review immediately.
Monbiot’s book is an investigation into how we can address all the competing conditions around food production so as to feed the world without trashing it. That means that all sorts of holy cows (both figurative and literal) need to put firmly into retirement and strongly discouraged from reproducing themselves. The debate around this is full of all sorts of unquestioned absolutizations and entrenched oppositions that can only be addressed by reconsidering the framework in which they are thought about. Monbiot does this by rightly insisting on maintaining the broader question of how the poor of the world are going to be fed alongside that of how environmental destruction from farming can be reduced or eliminated. He does not accept partial answers as final, whether that means organic farming dependent on animal manure, rewilding on the Knepp model with very small numbers of animals culled for meat in a rewilded landscape, or no-till farming that still employs herbicides to clear the unploughed ground for a new crop. All of these models are respected as far as they go – but it is nowhere near far enough to address all the complex conditions we are facing. Monbiot has to constantly employ the Middle Way in practice to find his way through these complex arguments – even though he would probably not call it that, and even still uses the term ‘incremental’ pejoratively. He has to be balanced in a deeper sense of balance, avoiding absolutizations, to be radical in the ways the situation requires.
Monbiot leaves us in no doubt about the urgency and importance of food production as the most important source of our global problems of global heating and loss of biodiversity. 12% of the world’s land area is used to grow crops, and 28% for animal grazing – yet animals fed by grazing alone provide only 1% of the world’s protein, and 43% of those croplands are used to grow food for animals. This means that if everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could not only eliminate use of land for pasture but also a large proportion of the cropland – freeing up three-quarters of the world’ agricultural land for rewilding (all these figures can be checked on Oxford University’s Our World in Data site). As Monbiot writes:
I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species… and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives depend. (p.77)
One of the reasons that people often underestimate the importance of land use is that they read figures about the contribution of agriculture to global heating that show it to be just one of a number of contributing sources, not the biggest. Its impact on global heating is systematically underestimated, because these figures do not take into account what the land used for agriculture is not doing because it is being used by agriculture – the “opportunity costs” as Monbiot calls them. These opportunity costs are huge, because they mean that around 30% of the world’s land that could be absorbing carbon as forest, wetland etc, is not doing so. When this is pointed out, the farming lobby often responds with exaggerated claims about the levels of carbon absorption in the soil of pasture when optimally managed (including the work of Allan Savory, which Monbiot carefully debunks). According to Monbiot and his references, not only are these claims exaggerated, but the latest research might lead us to question whether carbon can be reliably stored in soil (other than very wet soil or peat) at all. Another reason why people underestimate it is that they consider global heating in isolation from the biodiversity crisis – which is just as pressing. Land use is indisputably the source of the biodiversity crisis: we are just not giving enough space to other life forms.
Monbiot’s reminders of the widest pressing conditions through reliably-sourced statistics form an important backbone of the case in his book, but there is much more to it than that. The first chapter begins much more personally, in an orchard, where Monbiot sits down to look carefully at a small patch of soil, in the process bringing home its complexity. Most of the book consists of a series of encounters with key people who can give him evidence about potential ways forward in the land use crisis. There is Iain Tolhurst, who successfully produces organic fruit and veg on a commercial scale without using animal manure, through the use of wild flower strips to provide cover for pest predators and applications of wood chip to boost fertility. There is Tim Ashton, the no-till grain farmer, and finally Pasi Vainikka, a Finnish developer of revolutionary new food protein through the fermentation of bacteria in vats. It is this final, “farmfree” high-tech solution to meeting humanity’s protein needs that gets the most emphasis in Monbiot’s publicity video for the book (below), but the other figures were to my mind just as interesting and relevant.
The work of Iain Tolhurst (‘Tolly’) is remarkable because it demonstrates the falsity of the insistence often found in organic or permaculturist circles that animal use is always necessary for a sustainable food system. As Monbiot points out, many organic farms thus make themselves dependent on livestock farms as sources of manure, with little checking of how those animals have been treated or what antibiotic residues might be in their manure. More importantly, manure is also a very blunt instrument for fertilizing a crop, providing constant nutrients when the plant needs them more at some times than others: manure can thus contribute greatly to the washing out of excessive nutrients that is in the process of destroying the ecology of many British rivers. ‘Tolly’ by contrast, has not only found ways of limiting pest numbers by harbouring their predators in a biodiverse area of wild flowers near the crop, but also manages to fertilize it successfully through only limited applications of wood chippings. Monbiot’s case is that crops do not need manure – what they need is the gentler nourishment provided by limited plant material at the right time in their development.
As a functional vegan of about 30 years, who is now developing a forest garden for sustainable food production on former pasture land, this was eye-opening. I have often had doubts about the argument that animals are necessary, but have never had sufficient evident to support it, and thus have increasingly considered it a weakness in the vegan case. However, reading Monbiot’s book has made me much more confident in my belief that I can set up sustainable food production in a forest garden without needing animals or (in the long-term) their manure – although for the moment I have inherited a large heap of it with the land. That’s a great relief, as I particularly do not want the time-consuming responsibility of looking after animals, quite apart from the land use issues. In the short term, that means lots of mowing, but in the longer term that will decrease as the land I am working with becomes more effectively forested and covered with other perennials.
Monbiot also discusses the huge value of switching to perennial plants rather than annuals, so that we do not have to keep breaking up the soil with its valuable micro-organisms, earthworms and rhizosphere (zone around roots set up to sustain a plant). I was already very much aware of this from my reading of agroforestry literature – which oddly Monbiot does not mention at all. He starts to make use of a new perennial type of wheat called Kernza, which again was a fascinating discovery for me, but for some reason he does not discuss all the other ways that trees and perennial plants can help to fulfil our needs for not only fruit and nuts, but also potentially legumes and other vegetables, and the ways that agroforestry can create a very biodiverse space that nevertheless produces lots of food. His question may be ‘Can this feed the world?’ and this is a fair enough question, but one that I would have liked to see him address. My own guess for now is that agroforestry can at least make a significant contribution to feeding the world, because although it does not produce commercial quantities of any one foodstuff, it could offer a very sustainable (and low-labour) alternative means of food production for small communities that does not necessarily require large amounts of land (nor necessarily high-quality arable farmland).
Monbiot’s case, however, is that what we need most of all is a ‘new agronomy’, giving us a detailed enough understanding of fertility to be able to reproduce Tolly’s successful experiment in animal-free organic horticulture elsewhere. We also need the rapid development of perennial grain crops, and the development of ‘farmfree’ protein production. We need to stop worrying unnecessarily about ‘food miles’ which a an almost negligible overall effect compared to the impact of land use, but we do need more community ownership and fair trading to counteract the capture of food resources by massive corporate interests. Livestock farmers need to face up to the fact that their industry has no future, but be given help in adapting and diversifying. He thus avoids a series of absolutizing dogmas: the dogmas of those who reject new technology just because it is new, the dogmas of those who think animal farming must be good because it is traditional and enculturated, and the dogmas of those who focus parochially just on one aspect of the complex picture (such as localism) and assume that that is enough to make food production sustainable. Most of all he questions the dogmatism of those who are content to develop small localised sources of organic or permacultural food at a high price, but who dismiss the wider question of how the poor of the world will access the food they need. At no point does Monbiot belittle those who have made these major achievements in making food production more sustainable, but he still points out their limitations, and disagrees with any dogmatic assumption that they are the final solution.
This is a superb book that I think everyone should read, but it is not without its own limitations and mistakes. I have already mentioned the omission of agroforestry, and no doubt many others will have their own favoured solution that they will complain Monbiot either does not consider or does not do justice to. I don’t think he is aiming to be comprehensive, though, only to raise our awareness of some new solutions that we may not have considered very much before. Amongst these, I was not entirely convinced by Monbiot’s degree of enthusiasm for ‘farmfree’ bacterial cultivation. He is right to point out that the use of technology and the ‘yuck’ factor are not grown-up arguments against this. However, enthusiasm for this, as for any new technology whatsoever, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, until we see how well it works in practice when produced in volume and sold to consumers. There is also the question of how much the use of this technology is really necessary, given that we already have plenty of plant-based meat substitutes providing protein, and that these can be produced on massively less land, with massively less incidental suffering , than their animal equivalents. Time will tell.
On his account of the cultural entrenchment of animal farming, though, I felt there were some basic mistakes. He blames the idealization of animal farming on ‘poetry’ – that is, the strong pastoral tradition that presents the life of the shepherd as a bucolic ideal – and thinks we need more ‘numbers’ and less ‘poetry’. This makes the very basic mistake of confusing meaning and belief – that is, the value of the cultural symbols themselves with the negative effects of the dogmatic beliefs that have become associated with them. Pastoral poetry has inspired generations of readers in all sorts of ways: it is largely archetypal in its effects, meaning that it offers inspiration because of its meaning, independently of the beliefs that may have become associated with particular interpretations of it. Poetry as a whole is not to blame for the interpretation of that poetry as supporting dogmatic beliefs about the absolute value of animal agriculture, only for (at worst) limiting our awareness of its downsides by not making those downsides so meaningful to us. The same point applies in reverse to numbers, which are not in themselves significant at all, and thus not beneficial or otherwise. It is the way the numbers are used, to draw our attention to new conditions by more precisely making us aware of their extent, that is valuable. It is not maths that will save the world (plenty of people have been proficient in maths without doing so), but a broadening of awareness beyond one limited set of interdependent conditions to consider the wider systems in which they are embedded. Behind this error is a more basic, and common, mistake in our culture – the failure to distinguish meaning from belief, and thus credit the value of inspiring cultural symbols without reducing them simplistically to belief effects. Jeremy Lent, whom Monbiot admires as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age” is very much subject to the same limitation: one that I tried to broach with him to some extent in a podcast discussion in 2018.
If Monbiot unthinkingly reproduces a few of the dogmas of our age, however, this is a very minor matter compared to the large number of very important ones that he questions. However others may see him, he is not ideologically ‘left wing’ in any ways that restrict his critical skills, but only in ways that are carefully justified in relation to evidence brought into contact with a wide-ranging compassion. He is also quite literally grounded in a very human appreciation of the soil and of the wider environment – a factor that should not be underestimated. He can write wonderfully, and the message he offers here is extremely important. Whatever its minor defects, I urge you to read this book anyway.
Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive our Life, by Jill Bolte Taylor (Hay House, 2021). Review by Robert M. Ellis
‘Whole Brain Living’ is a new practically-oriented book on how to work with the ‘Four Characters’ Jill Bolte Taylor finds inside herself and inside every person. The ‘Four Characters’ put together two kinds of established divisions of the brain: brain lateralization (left v right hemisphere) and frontal versus back (or human versus reptilian). Bolte Taylor initially become well known for her TED talk on ‘My Stroke of Insight’, the stroke that disabled her left hemisphere and left her, a neuroscientist, with direct experience of brain lateralization and its importance. This book, however, is an account of the personal practice of working with her model of four parts of her brain – a model that she has developed since her stroke and long eight-year recovery from it.
The book begins with a general review of her own experience, as discussed in ‘My Stroke of Insight’, and of the way that neuroanatomy relates to our experience of judgement and of inner conflict. Most of the book, however, is given to describing the ‘Four Characters’, the different ways these characters appear in different circumstances, and the ways they can helpfully be brought to work together in a ‘Brain Huddle’. The first character is the left front or ‘rational’ brain: linguistic, orderly and goal-oriented. The second is the left back brain, to which she ascribes a reactive emotional function with a protective value – so it is the ‘Character 2’ who is anxious and defensive. The third character is the right back brain, which she describes as concerned with sensual enjoyment, aesthetics and fun – the positive emotional self. Character 4, finally, is the right front brain, to which she ascribes an undifferentiated openness and love that is also God.
The book is in my view a flawed masterpiece. A masterpiece because it does new things that badly needed to be done and in which she blazes a trail – that is, the creation of a readable, practically-oriented book that combines the alternative models hitherto offered by brain lateralization (as discussed by Iain McGilchrist) and the ‘three systems’ account of the brain applied practically by such writers as Paul Gilbert (the goal-driven system, the protective system and the ‘soothing’ system). Many people may be able to engage with ‘Whole Brain Living’ who have found McGilchrist too daunting. The book is also flawed, however, because there are nevertheless some major assumptions that interfere seriously with its practical purpose and make it less helpful to people than it might be – more on this below.
Unlike the reaction I would expect from many academics (though I have not yet read any other reviews), I am not going to criticize this book for being a practical, popular book rather than an academic book. The four characters are very obviously a simplification of the very complex neuroscience. However, the precise relationship of those four characters to parts of the brain is far less important, in practice, than whether they correspond to universal aspects of everyone’s psychological experience. The neuroscientific evidence is obviously likely to be interpreted in the light of this experience, but the key thing in a book of this kind is not that they should be entirely beyond criticism, but that they should be provisional as well as compatible with a credible interpretation of our observations of the brain. I do have some reservations, which I will elaborate below, on how provisional some aspects of Bolte Taylor’s account really are, because I think there are some unquestioned assumptions in her approach that undermine her provisionality. However, the four characters surely correspond closely enough to most people’s experience for the book at least to be eye-opening and informative to many people, especially those not already familiar with both brain lateralization and the three systems model.
Bolte Taylor’s scheme manages to convey what brain lateralization means in practice – that is, the ways that we can get stuck in either of the two related aspects of the left hemisphere function – both in protective reactions and in ‘rational’ models of a situation that both serve us ill when we over-depend on them alone. She also shows much of the ways that right hemisphere awareness can help to liberate us from these constraints by providing wider awareness beyond narrow left hemisphere assumptions. Her model of the ‘Brain Huddle’, enabled by a process with the initial letters of ‘BRAIN’ – breath, recognize, appreciate, inquire and navigate – also provides a potentially fruitful model for putting the wider awareness of the right hemisphere in touch with the left. This core practical process is supplemented by a number of other practical tips that can surely help many people in the process of integration.
Bolte Taylor also relates four Jungian archetypal functions to each of her characters – the persona (or hero) for the front left character 1, the shadow for back left character 2, the anima/animus for back right character 3, and the God or Self archetype for the front right character 4. This is in some ways in harmony with the similar approach I take myself in my forthcoming book ‘Archetypes in Religion and Beyond’, so I see it as promising, but it is very briefly done and hardly explained at all. There is simply a great deal more to be said about this.
However, I have a whole list of caveats to qualify this very broad approval of the book. I will need to give more attention to these caveats than I have to my initial praise, in order to explain them adequately. They are also worth explaining, because they are perhaps likely to be missed by more uncritical readers, as well as evidently by the author herself, and perhaps even by those who I expect to respond with narrowly-focused disapproval directed solely at the precision of the neuroscience. I criticize here, instead, not for its own sake or to defend academic territory, but because I think the issues criticized have practical implications, and I do so not from the position of a specialized neuroscientist, but from that of a sympathetic generalist and synthetic philosopher.
There are problems here, firstly, with the possible practical effects of the way the characters are divided from each other. There is also a lack of a clear model of the conflict that is being overcome, which seems in turn to be traceable to a different interpretation of the neuroscience of temporal experience from that used by McGilchrist. There are major problems with the ways in which ‘Character 4’ is presented, which fail to avoid (or see any problem with) metaphysical claims: these in turn depend on a lack of awareness of the distinction between belief and meaning, and an apparently naïve relativism about religious traditions. Overall, too, there is a very unsatisfactory approach to the whole project of writing a popular and practical book that is nevertheless based on evidence, not because simplification is wrong, but because issues of authority need to be addressed for practical reasons.
There are obvious cons as well as advantages to the way that Bolte Taylor has divided each of the ‘characters’ within each hemisphere from the other, and especially from the way she categorizes this division as ‘thinking’ versus ‘feeling’. For we cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking: every thought has to be motivated and every emotional response rationalized. In Bolte Taylor’s division of the left hemisphere, for instance, character 1 represents the ‘rational’ responses of the left pre-frontal cortex, whereas character 2 represents our rapid protective responses dependent on association with past or anticipated threats, particularly associated with the left amygdala. However, these responses are not separate. Rather they depend on each other in a closed, reinforcing feedback loop in which our beliefs shape our protective drives and our protective drives shape our beliefs. Seeing them as separate characters may help us to reflect on the ways they each contribute to our overall judgement, but they are conjoined twins. Bolte Taylor seems to miss the ways in which even highly rationalized dogmatic rigidity continues to depend on anxiety and group conformity, whilst even the most ‘emotional’ protective reactions may have elaborate rationalizations attached to them. Similarly in the right hemisphere, Bolte Taylor wants to separate our aesthetic responses and positive emotions from our overall base awareness – but these things are inseparable in a way that hemispheric differences are not. Religious experiences, for instance, are constantly accompanied by aesthetic ones, because both are rooted in our bodily and sensual awareness.
The scheme of four characters does not take into account the ways in which two of the relationships between them are those of conjoined twins. This carries obvious dangers that people will over-estimate the divisions between ‘rational’ and emotional’ – which is something most people do already, so it scarcely needs any encouragement. If the scheme is actually going to help people recognize interdependency between all four characters, it cannot present them as equally independent from each other to begin with.
This leads me to the second problem in Bolte Taylor’s scheme: the lack of a clear model of conflict. If our process of integration is based only on bringing the four characters together, this implicitly assumes that our conflicts are conflicts between the characters – an assumption that Bolte Taylor seems to constantly reinforce. But seeing brain conflicts as conflicts between ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ parts of the same hemisphere is like seeing a football match as a competition between members of the same team, whilst seeing it as a conflict between left and right hemispheres is like seeing it as a conflict between the players and the referee. No, examine any conflict whatsoever and you will find that it consists in rigid absolutized beliefs, motivated by our reactions, yes, and in conflict with each other. The left hemisphere is not in conflict with the right hemisphere, but with the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere offers the mediating context in which such conflict can be resolved.
To understand the nature of the left hemisphere’s conflict with itself, we thus need to introduce the temporal perspective whereby we can see that left hemisphere representations (and their motives) vary over time. Because left hemisphere representations absolutize, however, they maintain no awareness of this variation, and are accompanied by the assumption that each set of beliefs at a given time is a complete and final set of beliefs. It is the awareness over time offered by the right hemisphere, however, that offers the potential for unifying these divided left hemisphere beliefs. Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary, makes the neuroscientific basis for this clear and cites the evidence for it: only the right hemisphere is aware of the passing of time, whilst all the left can do is put things in conceptual sequences. Bolte Taylor, however, on the contrary presents the left hemisphere as aware of time (solely because of its awareness of sequence) and the right as timeless. Since, unlike McGilchrist, she gives no references, it is impossible to tell on what basis she does so. The effect, however, is evidently that she does not really understand the relationship between psychological conflict and the hemispheres. Although she wants us to bring our left and right hemispheres into greater mutual awareness, there is no explanation of the way that the contextualization of the right hemisphere over time is responsible for conflicts between left hemisphere motives at different times.
Related to this problem may well be the difficulty of differentiating the right hemisphere’s own activity from appropriations of the right hemisphere perspective by the left. When in some respect there appears to be a right-left conflict, this is only made possible because at one point in time the left hemisphere has represented to itself what it assumes the right hemisphere perspective to be, and turned it into represented beliefs about how things ultimately are. We could see this in an aesthetic quarrel for instance, or in a dispute between a utilitarian perspective and an artistic one – we might assume the artistic perspective to be ‘right hemisphere’, but it is actually a left hemisphere perspective appealing to a right hemisphere experience for its justification. If it was not left hemisphere based we could not argue it. However, this point seems to escape Bolte Taylor as she constantly presents the right hemisphere characters 3 and 4 as having rationalized perspectives.
The biggest difficulty created by this failure to recognize left hemisphere appropriation is evident when Bolte Taylor assumes that metaphysical beliefs are acceptable, treating them as genuine expressions of the left hemisphere character 4. For example, she claims that “Our character 4 is the all-knowing intelligence from which we came, and it is how we incarnate the consciousness of the universe” (p.125). She later urges us to “use whatever language is comfortable for your belief system” (p.131), suggesting that because the right hemisphere is associated with undifferentiated meaning, this must necessarily be turned into beliefs about the whole universe – a completely unfounded though traditional dogma. If Bolte Taylor turned to embodied meaning theory in cognitive linguistics, to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for instance, she would see how it is entirely possible to recognize the undifferentiated meaning of infancy in the right hemisphere perspective without quote unnecessarily associating that meaning with speculative metaphysical beliefs. Our undifferentiated experience does not tell us about the whole universe or about beings who rule the whole universe, but rather it is precisely just that – undifferentiated meaning. The importance of getting in touch with our awareness of undifferentiated meaning as a source of contextual awareness and inspiration is very great, as shown in Bolte Taylor’s discussion of character 4, but to turn it into metaphysics betrays the right hemisphere perspective entirely and turns it into the absolutizations of the left, thinking it has the whole picture when processing experiences of the right, but shutting itself off from the perspective of the right in the interpretation it makes (with further support from tradition and group pressure).
To suggest that we should “use whatever language is comfortable for your belief system” entirely misses the point that absolute belief systems are incompatible with a genuine unappropriated character 4 perspeective. It leaves us, in fact, with relativism, in the sense of the incoherent dogma that all beliefs are absolute and thus as good as each other, so you may as well follow some trivial preference when choosing from the smorgasbord of religious traditions. On the contrary, to be able to interact with religious traditions helpfully we need to integrate the left hemisphere’s critical perspective with a full appreciation of the inspirational value of right hemisphere experience, allowing that critical perspective to be brought to bear in all issues of belief as opposed to meaning. Moreover, since the distinction between meaning and belief is merely one of the strength of associative neural links in response to stimuli, there is a plausible neuroscientific basis for the distinction as well as a vital practical one.
Finally, then, there are unavoidable issues with the whole way Bolte Taylor has gone about writing this book. It is a book built on many assertions both about neuroscience, about psychology, and about helpful practice. She undoubtedly has an in-depth understanding of all these things, but her approach to sharing this is just to tell us, without offering any of the equipment that would be needed to follow it up or think about it for ourselves –something that is essential for this type of material if Bolte Taylor doesn’t want to become yet another guru whose word is accepted unconditionally by her followers. There are about 3 references in a book that clearly demands hundreds of them. There is no bibliography, no suggestions for further reading. If she does not want to be interpreted as merely appealing to her own authority, and encouraging cycles of unhealthy dependence on that authority, it is vital for her to give people that equipment and encouragement to their own research and thinking, and help them compare her insights with those of others.
It is easy to become a guru, but much harder to adopt that role responsibly by aiming to make oneself redundant. There is a delicate line to tread between adopting unnecessary and off-putting academic conventions that would not be relevant, and maintaining those that have much practical value in what she is setting out to do. But she clearly has not struck the right balance here. Please share your practical insights with us, Jill, but do so by putting your own work in a wider context in which it can shine all the more brightly. Do not patronise your readers or encourage them to over-depend on you, but be circumspect in way you offer them the advice that could be so helpful to them. It is a weighty responsibility.
A talk about the Middle Way, both in Buddhism and as a universal principle, delivered to a Buddhist audience on a hot day in the context of a camping retreat at Buddhafield.
