Dystopian Trouble Needs Progress, Not Utopia

A McGilchrist-Influenced Reflection on Some Limitations of Idealistic Social Hope

The story of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an exquisitely apt image of the relations between the Right and Left hemispheres of the brain, as described by Iain McGilchrist. His great 2009 book was called The Master and His Emissary, a metaphor chosen to evoke their proper roles: the wiser Right Hemisphere (RH) is the legitimate authority, while the grasping Left Hemisphere (LH) is its indispensable Emissary.

Sir John Gielgud as Prospero in The Tempest.

In so many stories—notably, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and here, in The Tempest—the LH’s ambitions overreach the bounds of its role as Emissary, Apprentice, Servant, etc. It usurps the authority of its Master, with disastrous results. This process includes the LH’s clinically demonstrable tendency to confabulate: to believe its own lies when these can serve its turn.

In McGilchristean terms, Shakespeare frames Antonio—Prospero’s corrupt, usurping brother—as the embodiment of the Left Hemisphere, including its tendency to confabulate: “to credit his own lie” when it serves his pursuit of power and advantage.

Shakespeare’s stormy island drama depicts the resolution of a lifelong injustice, restoring balance to a world that’s out of joint. Prospero is a powerful magician who has spent many years on an uncharted island with almost no one else: only his young daughter Miranda; a wild man called Caliban; and Ariel, a spirit who serves him.

How did the old wizard wind up thus marooned in the middle of nowhere? He tells his child, as she comes of age:

Prospero.

My brother and thy uncle, call’d Antonio—
I pray thee, mark me—that a brother should
Be so perfidious!—he whom next thyself
Of all the world I loved and to him put
The manage of my state; as at that time
Through all the signories it was the first
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle—
Dost thou attend me?

Miranda:

Sir, most heedfully.

That’s the heart of it: the man’s depth is an aspect of his goodness, suiting him for leadership—but that same depth also leads him away from his responsibilities, into the ongoing trance of the contemplative and intellectual life. Meantime, his brother—more superficial, cynical, and dynamically effective—steals his way into the resulting power vacuum, deposing the brilliant Duke:

Prospero.

I pray thee, mark me.
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retired,
O’er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother
Awaked an evil nature; and my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was; which had indeed no limit,
A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact, like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie, he did believe
He was indeed the duke; out o’ the substitution
And executing the outward face of royalty,
With all prerogative: hence his ambition growing—
Dost thou hear?

There it is.

My subject today is not just the piquant congruence between McGilchrist’s parable and the glorious final drama of the Bard.

I want to point out an inbuilt irony that besets our necessary collective task of restoring the vital balance of the two hemispheres’ interdependent modes of being.

When we read McGilchrist, we come to understand better and better, till it hurts, the terrible extent to which our culture has surrendered to the LH. Freshly illuminated by his insights from neuroscience, we relearn some of what we have perhaps learned from Derrick Jensen’s biting critique of modernity The Culture of Make-Believe; from Morris Berman’s The Re-Enchantment of the World; from Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine; and from similar works. Most everywhere, the humanities, the arts, and religion are pushed to the margins, or actively derided. Universities dissolve their departments of philosophy, of literature, of music, and trumpet their devotion to S.T.E.M.: a misleadingly botanical acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (each of which has its spiritual heights, but those are rarely mentioned). To read his critique of our current cultural impasse is to yearn for redress and improvement.

So we celebrate the disciplines that help with that effort, which is very salutary. But there is a risk that we will conflate the actual practice of those disciplines, with the mere naming of their core values: love, compassion, reverence for the natural world, and several allied virtues we neglect at our peril. The trouble is not so much that making these explicit is itself a departure from the RH’s ethos of implicit value. The trouble is that merely naming them can be misused as a performative substitute for actively intervening.

My concern is about the vexing choice between two different understandings of what balance is in this matter, and of how its restoration ought best to be conceived when the outcome is the criterion that counts.

One approach is to confront the current imbalance by supplying more of what is lacking. Idealistic organizations and their representatives decry the perilous LH dominance that surrounds us in our built environment, the techno-industrial world of consumer society and its ruinous belief in “infinite economic growth on a finite planet.” They rightly denounce the horrors of deforestation, pollution, depletion, and climate change, and fairly quickly start asserting that the path of hope is not a “merely” pragmatic set of policy changes and adjustments to our current living arrangements; that would be uninspired. The needful thing, they tend to say, is a “paradigm shift of consciousness.” This is just around the corner, and the assembled present company of listeners is proof that a critical mass of like-minded transformational people is indeed on the scene, or almost so. The word “love” is heard again and again. Sometimes the name and music of John Lennon is invoked.¹ My patience for such an atmosphere is, alas, somewhat limited.

The other approach is to confront the current imbalance not by adding more of what’s missing, but instead adding more of the balanced mixture we need. Instead of balancing an excess of LH by adding ever more RH, we can add-in a representative sample of what the desired mixture might look like if we were to succeed.

I think of that balance as—to put it in crudely quantitative and explicit terms—roughly 60% RH and 40% LH. The right hemisphere, with its worldview and its faculties, is in the role of leader, not tyrant, while the left hemisphere is its honored subordinate.

Decent but ineffectual Good Kirk vs. ruthless Evil Kirk.

There’s a great episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek TV show—the original version, that aired from 1966 to 1968—called “The Enemy Within.” It was the fifth episode of the show’s first season, written by Richard Matheson and directed by Leo Penn (aired 10/6/66). A malfunction of the ship’s transporter splits Captain Kirk into two physically identical individuals, one of whom is good, the other evil. Not for a moment do I mean to suggest that those moral categories apply to the hemispheres. But what does apply is the RH’s patience, contemplation, and concern with responsibility, and the LH’s grasping, efficient, action-driven pursuit of advantage. As the episode shows with compelling concision, the Good Kirk is more sane, more decent, and more wise—but unable to lead. The Evil Kirk is venal, cynical, obsessive—and decisive.

As people of goodwill convene to consider the ills of a world on the brink of disaster, I suspect they may do best to shift from fantasies of transformation to plans of reform and incremental adjustment. A roomful of wistful advocates for an enlightened “new paradigm” can bring to mind this snarky couplet from James Joyce’s 1905 poem, “The Holy Office”: That they may dream their dreamy dreams, / I carry off their filthy streams.

Too much harping on the mere names of our values is not good. It is all very well to espouse love, and compassion, and epistemic humility, but by itself it gets us nowhere.

My preference would be to leave in place the sort of conferences and panels and conversations that lead to that point—but once reached, immediately to depart from it into either of two alternatives: poetic storytelling, or pragmatic action. We need both.

Plenty has been said, recently and well, about the transformational power of story, and the urgency of a renewal thereof. The era of Joseph Campbell having apparently come and gone, I recommend the work of Dr. Martin Shaw.

As for pragmatic action, here are a few “really existing” organizations actively rebuilding the humanities, the natural world, and the relational web that ought to connect people at ascending scales from the dyadic couple on up to the global human community:

Environment

Project Drawdown is the best of a very few climate change orgs that focus on repairing the climate, by expanding the known methods for removing the trillion tons of excess carbon already loaded into Earth’s atmosphere. It’s the most hopeful, action-oriented, forward-looking website on the environment I’ve ever seen. And it squanders no time on the futile theatrics of “raising awareness,” nor on the perverse anti-thrills of doom discourse.

Instead, Project Drawdown is replete with specific approaches, already underway, lucidly explained. These include marine permaculture, ocean iron fertilization, methane mitigation, synthetic limestone manufacture from CO2, and many more—without, notably, the scientific non-starter that is Direct Air Capture (“DAC”), on which the Biden Administration wasted billions of dollars.

Education

Ralston College is a new humanities-oriented school for the Western tradition of philosophy, literature, religion, and the arts. Its new Chancellor is none other than Iain McGilchrist himself. He recently gave its Commencement Address.

Emet Classical Academy “is a Jewish preparatory school for 5th to 12th graders in Manhattan. We are committed to the pursuit of excellence in every academic and cultural field, the formation of confident Jews and civic-minded Americans, and the preservation of the best of Western civilization.” Emet is one of a growing number of Jewish institutions that have arisen in response to the antizionist hate movement, which has marginalized Jews at every level of the American education system and cultural establishment.

Relationality

I found three organizations that profess a mission of enhancing social connection and social cohesion, building a high-trust society, and reducing the isolation that breeds depression and despair. I don’t know them well, but so far they each look pretty great:

• https://einhorncollaborative.org/

• https://www.social-connection.org/

• https://www.sociallifeproject.org/

Regenerative Agriculture

Some eight years ago, athing called Food Tank (“The Think Tank for Food”) published this list of 18 Organizations Promoting Regenerative Agriculture Around the Globe, almost all of which are still working and growing.

The main idea of this post, once more:

Everybody knows our world is perilously imbalanced toward excessive left-brained thinking—utilitarian, prosaic, extractive, quantitative, maximalist (“more is always better”), competitive, and unwavering in the omnicidal pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.

The best way to proceed might not be to oppose that extreme with an opposite extreme of passionate outrage (throwing soup at the Mona Lisa will not fix the oceans), nor a blissed-out quietism in which mantras and sloganeering about the superiority of lovingkindness will somehow usher in a New Age of “a world become One, of salads and sun.”

Instead, we ought to move forward on several fronts at the same time, including a great expansion of artistic, educational, and spiritual practices, using existing organizations that are already doing good work.

These should, I think, be complemented by investments of money, time, and energy into the reform and redirection of existing institutions, changing them from within instead of condemning the people who are trying to participate successfully.

We should find ways to get wealthy by fixing problems of biodiversity loss, carbonization, energy scarcity, food waste, pesticide and herbicide proliferation, microplastics, and so on. Improvements that depend entirely upon utopian idealism, stigmatization, and political pressure are unlikely to succeed.

As Aristotle urges in the Nicomachean Ethics, in almost all things, the viable middleground is the safe and needful way between the perilous extremes. Courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice and rashness. Today the political scene shows burgeoning extremes of left and right, dragging us downward, perhaps even toward the darkest abyss of our possibilities. The center is the sane region of balance and feasible improvements, and it is not achieved by combining any pair of diametrically opposed forms of fanaticism.

This is not to suggest that big loud feelings and dire warning are inappropriate—they are all-too necessary. But they are not an action program.

In Shakespeare’s awesome finale to his own writing life, The Tempest, Prospero has lost his dukedom to his cynical brother by losing himself in his scholarly and artistic passions. Years later, in the action onstage, he draws his opponents into an instructive ordeal; he forgives them; and he ultimately regains his role as Duke of Milan. This is not accomplished through more of the old dichotomy in which the usurper Antonio was the man of action, while Prospero was the hapless, passive dreamer. No, the rightful Duke regains his seat with a new combination of his old philosophical spirit and a mastery of interpersonal affairs he has acquired in the long misery of the meantime.

Couraggio!

1. Those who have come to find John Lennon’s political idealism cloying and saccharine may find relief (and delight) in Steely Dan’s exquisite answer to it, “Only A Fool Would Say That.”