It is often claimed that we are experiencing a crisis of meaning (McGilChrist, 2021). Far more people in the history of the world now live separate from the natural world, alienated from structures and traditions of stable society and dismissive of the divine. These elements are what have always provided a sense of belonging and centre on relationship: with each other, the natural world and the divine. Based on contemporary research they are the three elements that most determine happiness and fulfilment. We no longer belong to our world. “We have unmade the world” writes McGilChrist (p.2024, 2021). This is new in the history of humanity (it has all happened in the last 250-300 years) and it is ‘impossible to exaggerate its significance’. We have disregarded the ancient wisdom of our cultures. Social cohesion is diminishing, being replaced by atomised individualism as we experience an epidemic of depression, anxiety and loneliness. We neglect all that is implicit which is ‘nine-tenths of what matters’. McGilChrist quotes The secret of the golden flower which claims that the conscious mind is like a “violent general of a strong fiefdom controlling things from a distance, until the sword is turned around” (p.2025). Schrodinger claims that no self is alone – ‘I’ is ‘chained to ancestry by many factors’. This is not allegory but ‘eternal memory’. A society is not an assembly of individuals but individuals are part of the organism that is society. We grow from networks that exist before us into ones that exist after.
Social understanding, empathy and connectedness is all better understood by the right hemisphere (McGilChrist, 2021). The values that underpin the hedonic pursuit of happiness lead to higher levels of mental illness and suicide. Satisfaction and happiness ratings in all modern societies subjected to research have decreased as they become more ‘westernised’. Psychologist Jean Twenge has studied rates of psychopathology in adolescents using the same assessment tool and stringent standards from the years 1938 to 2007. There are between five and eight times as many students who meet the cut-off for psychopathology in the latest group compared to the earliest – this may be an underestimate as many of the latest are on antidepressants that did not exist for the first group. Loneliness is worse in each generation leading people to seek community in polarising and radical ways. In the Cigna US loneliness Index of 2018, when people were asked how often they feel no one knows them well more than half said they feel that way always or sometimes and half said their relationships were not meaningful. There is a clear link between suicide and individualism from contemporary research. Durkeim noted in the 19th century that loss of a sense of belonging and having a secure role in society (‘anomie’), loss of societal values, norms, goals ‘are concomitants of suicide’.
McGilChrist (2021) writes: “If we had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would be hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it…minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of transcendent set of values” (p.2042). We have lost a ‘sense of deep connexion and communion, eliciting feelings of longing, tenderness and compassion’ (p.2043).
McGilChrist (2021) notes that as a culture we are losing our capacity for sorrow and with it our humanity. Sorrow is not anxiety or depression, states in which there is a diminished capacity for sorrow. Music, rites of religion, and tragedy ‘acknowledges sorrow and redeems it by taking it up into something with a capacity to heal’. Anger, instead is prominent. Sorrow depends on connexion; Anger on alienation. Sorrow is also linked to a capacity for empathy, both of which are heavily dependent on the right hemisphere. Anger and denial are dependant on the left. Our art privileges anger and positivity over sorrow and we have lost our capacity to mourn all we are killing as acknowledging that loss might be too painful for us to bear. The trio of elements that comprise the basis of well-being is ‘as near fact as we can get’ (p.2046). Spending time in nature is linked with improved mental and physical health, well-being and happiness, improved cognition, attention and social functioning. Nature deprivation can lead to anxiety, anger, frustration, problems with cognition and attention, physical and psychological stress. Nature is ‘our mother and our healer and our home, as well as our ultimate fate…the great whole to which we belong’ (p.2047).
Wisdom and humour are being lost too – important elements in healing (McGilChrist, 2021). The world is far different from how it is generally understood: “It is a world in which relationships are ontologically primary, foundational; and ‘things’ are secondary, emergent property of relationships” (p2051). We are not the ‘lonely, isolated, predatory egos…hurled into an alien universe” (p.2052). There is no living without myth and we need a good myth to live by. McGilChrist claims: “I offer a myth that…promotes much needed healing, not further destruction…on (this) everything depends”.
McgilChrist notes that Robert Sperry wrote that the ills of western society come down to a discrimination against the right hemisphere. Any attempt to change the symptoms of our global condition (poverty, pollution etc.) won’t succeed until there is a change in the human values involved. Human values are “the universal determinant of all human actions and decisions” (p.2056). The right hemisphere has a better grasp of moral values, takes responsibility rather than blaming, inhibits the first impulse, is more intelligent, and has insight. Scheler wrote that every being believes in a god or an idol. Having discarded God our idol is ourselves and our desire to gain power over every aspect of nature. ‘God’ is a problematic term, says McGilchrist, but its repudiation is not wise. It is easy to misunderstand it and reject it completely. But, it is our duty, says McGilChrist, to find the core of wisdom in the universal insight that is referred to as ‘God’. This is poorly understood but “that there is such an inestimably valuable core seems to me more credible that anything else I know” (p.2058).
References
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world.