The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
— Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
By Wayne Allensworth
I craned my neck to see the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I felt the exhilarating sensation of a tingle running through my scalp as I gazed at the Creation, the Fall, the Expulsion from the Garden, Noah and the Flood, the scenes arrayed in Michelangelo’s grand scheme, each panel imbued with the artist’s inspired vision. It was sublime, beautiful, stirring. The corners of the chapel depicted other Biblical stories: the plague of serpents, David beheading Goliath. There wasn’t enough time, really, to take it all in.
And all around me a sea of tourists milled about, breaking every rule set for respectfully viewing the chapel. They were busy with cameras and new-fangled cell phones, pointing and chattering. I tried to phase them out by meditating on one of our civilization’s greatest works of art, but left the chapel torn between a sense of awe and one of resigned, weary loss. As modernity phased into postmodernity, life was no longer held to be a sacred gift, a discovery, a revelation and a path to the divine, but a series of events on a “bucket list.” Been there, done that. The dreadful scene in the Sistine Chapel, now some years distant, reminded me of the 1983 movie Vacation, with the Griswolds leaping out of their car, taking a quick glance at the Grand Canyon, and moving on. Check it off the list! Like the crowd at the chapel, they didn’t know what they were looking at. The movie was more perceptive than we gave it credit for.
I had witnessed the same depressing spectacle as in the Sistine at some of the most memorable spots on the globe. Louts and their cameras hell bent on certifying reality by capturing it on film. In cathedrals and castles, forests and canyons I attempted to recapture something of the vitality of a world that was once enchanted, haunted by spirits, swathed in a mysterious cloak of transcendence. And that took some doing.
The disenchantment of the world is but one facet of the loss of authenticity in our experience of it. Stripped bare of all tradition and ceremony, of myth and religion, of rites of passage and sacrifice, of poetry, metaphor, and symbol, the world becomes another machine, our minds mere algorithms supposedly coded into a computer-like brain. Robbed of mystery and grand narrative, we cannot resist the trivialization of the most sacred experiences humans can have. Our bodies are merely a collection of bones, muscles, and neurons. Our consciousness is an “emergent” epiphenomenon propelling us like robots through a dead universe. We traded robes for T-shirts, and words of wisdom for bumper stickers a long time ago. Romance and faith and love die along with enchantment, killed in part by the mockery of detached irony, the smarmy slobspeak of postmodern despair.
This is the left-brain hemisphere’s world, one that lacks ambiguity or nuance, imposes strict categorization on reality, and thrives on bureaucratic modes of operation. It is narrow in its viewpoint, utilitarian and theoretical, preferring theory to experience and practice, and tends to literalism and homogenization. It denies anything that contradicts its theoretical constructs. It privileges things over processes. The LH’s linear thinking can’t deal with intuition or insight, the realm of the RH. Its preference for the explicit is alien to implicit understanding, also based in the RH. The LH often can’t “get” a joke or understand the underlying lesson of a fable. It jettisons all-important contextualization. The LH’s tendency to deterministic materialism portrays a world inhabited — if that is the right world — by organic machines, or better, “meat computers,” a collection of automatons seeking out whatever immediate gratification may be available. It is disposed to wanting, not longing. The LH tends to reductionism, can’t cope with paradox, and won’t abide the notion that opposites can both be true. It casts everything in stark either/or terms, while the RH allows for the possibility of both/and. As far as the LH is concerned, the past is useless and as dead as the matter it came from. It builds a Godless world that cannot abide or understand transcendence, symbol, or metaphor, and thus, denies our most important vehicles for conveying meaning and purpose, which can be expressed no other way. What’s more, the machine-like world the LH has built, one of vast urban conglomerates, technology, and objectification traps us in a matrix that selects for and promotes those most disposed to technocracy. Art, music, and poetry are merely other forms of entertainment, of passing the time in a meaningless world. They are not valuable in themselves. Build me a computer program! Get me a return on my investment! Make my computer faster! We construct an artificial cocoon separating our disposable bodies from the vagaries of existence in the natural world, which is a resource to be controlled and exploited. The LH’s world is all about control and manipulation. It has no room for doubts. It’s the seat of the will to power.
And it may be, as proponents of epigenetics claim, that we pass our disposition to certain modes of thinking and learned behaviors — learned, that is, in a LH dominated milieu — on to our children. “Gene expression” could be a mechanism for learnt behaviors to be transmitted as an organism makes use of certain cell functions that alter the structure of the cell. Thus, cultural shifts may be passed on. As C.J. Lumsden, a leading proponent of sociobiology, has written on “gene culture co-evolution,” epigenetic mechanisms may “predispose mental development to take certain specific directions in the presence of certain kinds of cultural information.” And the predominate “cultural information” today is from a LH point of view.
Yet the LH’s assurance of certainty and control carried within it the seeds of nihilism as modernism phased into postmodernism. C. S. Lewis noted the chink in modernity’s armor well before he described the LH trap, though he did not know that’s what it was, we were falling into in his The Abolition of Man. Lewis would more explicitly note in other works that a deterministic materialism undermined its own vision of reality. Why? If our very thoughts, emotions, loves, hates, sympathies, and sentiments, and general personality, were the predetermined outcomes of the motions of atoms and the codes in our genes, or of ineluctable chemical processes,then how can we trust our own thoughts? Whose “facts” were correct or even could be correct? What could “making up one’s mind” possibly mean? And if that were the case, how could we trust someone’s plans, assertions, declarations, and claims to knowledge? How could we determine what is real and what is not, or even what “real” means? What would be the point of arguing over social or economic policies, much less questions of Being, meaning and purpose? What could one possibly “know” if our very thoughts were the results of deterministic processes? Any arguments would amount to howling into the void. Lewis correctly observed that in such conditions, whose preferences won out would be a matter of an assertion of the will to power. But he did not realize that he was essentially describing the basic assumptions of what would come to be called “postmodernism.” Under careful scrutiny, modernism collapses into postmodernism.
Nihilism permeates the societal sea in which we founder. In the long run, as they say, we are all dead, so why does anything really matter? The postmodern scream world, a shout of protest against an often painful reality, sweeps away every expression of beauty, objectifies every great valley or high place as holes in the ground or resources to be exploited, and robs us of meaning. Trivialization makes one place as holy as another, graffiti as artful as the Sistine Chapel, and “my truth” as good as yours, because whatever may be out there is inaccessible and unknowable, and all narratives are mere instruments of power. An attitude of easy cynicism follows from that. Enabling authentic experience would mean re-establishing a proper LH-RH cognitive balance, restoring the primacy of “the master” over “the emissary,” unraveling post-modernity, and reorganizing society. That’s a tall order, and it may take something highly disruptive, even catastrophic, to even have a chance to get there.
But we are not “meat computers,” and we can, as individuals, become aware of our dilemma and break out of a world of inauthenticity and detachment. As I wrote recently, breaking out of the trap paradoxically means consciously pursuing unselfconscious, authentic, experience. Direct experience that is not “framed” as a representation, which our present mindset prefers, as it can “store” and control the representation. Re-enchanting our world begins with ourselves. And, judging by the bare bones, big box store qualities of many of our contemporary churches, it will entail re-enchanting and re-sacralizing our own religion. We can’t fully reverse our loss of unselfconscious innocence but may be able to revive a sense of authenticity as individuals. That’s an obtainable goal, one within the reach of thoughtful people.
Iain McGilchrist on re-enchanting our world through religious faith, the relationship between the hemispheres and more (“You don’t know what you are missing…”):
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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