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Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others โ or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage and permit others to do so on your behalf. (The Lucifer Effect, p. 5)
"What would the left hemisphere's world look like if the left hemisphere of the brain became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere's world altogether?"In this series of posts I'd like to break down his conclusion and discuss just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere's perspective.
We could expect, for a start, that there would be a loss of the broader picture, and a substitution of a more narrowly focussed, restricted, but detailed, view of the world, making it perhaps difficult to maintain a coherent overview. The broader picture would in any case be disregarded, because it would lack the appearance of clarity and certainty which the left hemisphere craves. In general, the 'bits' of anything, the parts into which it could be disassembled, would come to seem more important, more likely to lead to knowledge and understanding, than the whole, which would come to be seen as no more than the sum of the parts.
Ever more narrowly focussed attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information, and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience. Knowledge, in its turn would seem more 'real' than what one might call wisdom, which would seem too nebulous, something never to be grasped.
One would expect the left hemisphere to keep doing refining experiments on detail, at which it is exceedingly proficient, but to be correspondingly blind to what is not clear or certain, or cannot be brought into focus right in the middle of the visual field. In fact one would expect a sort of dismissive attitude to anything outside of its limited focus, because the right hemisphere's take on the whole picture would simply not be available to it.
- Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Klavan's insight about the relationship between dystopias and atheism (or scientific materialism) is also perceptive. The fictional dystopias of Brave New World, The Giver, The Matrix โ and I would add, C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength โ invariably depict future states where men and women are treated as purely material entities devoid of moral impulse and spiritual longing. In such dystopian societies, a reductionist and materialistic concept of human beings ensures that something important โ love, freedom, human rights, justice, dignity, faith โ is always horrifically omitted or suppressed by those in control.
The totalitarian dystopias of the 20th century replicated this pattern, but in real life. National Socialism and Soviet Marxism both cited science as a justification for their materialistic ideologies and utopian visions but succeeded only in creating hell on Earth โ and, indeed, in perpetrating genocide. All of this supports Klavan's other key contention: "We need not abandon the scientific knowledge of modernity, but we must subjugate it to the needs of our humanity rather than allow its fleshless, sexless, motherless materialism to turn us into itself."
Comment: See also: