Dr Iain has impressive and impeccable credentials; whilst a literary scholar at Oxford University, he wrote a book called ‘Against Criticism’ in which he includes the experience that both I and my husband had when we were taking English Literature ourselves. That is, that the teaching focused on the form, context and structure of the work, rather than on its meaning and on the experience it evoked in the reader. This dissatisfaction eventually led him out of literary studies into medicine and psychiatry, where he became especially interested in the fact that the human brain (and that of most other mammals at least), is divided into two halves; the left hemisphere (LH) and the right hemisphere (RH).

He examined this phenomenon in the most overwhelming detail, with hundreds of references to scientific papers, in the book ‘The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world’. Why is the human brain (and that of almost every other creature) divided into two halves? A starting point is how each side pays attention. Imagine you are a little bird pecking for seed on the ground; whilst you need to pay focussed attention to what's going into your beak, you also need another kind of attention, more general and background, to notice the predator who is intent on having you for lunch. The former is the tendency of the LH, the latter that of the RH.

He then relates these different kinds of paying attention to the habits of thinking and assumptions by which the West tends to live now, suggesting that we have gone too far over to the LH tendency of reductionism and mechanistic thinking, forgetting the wider, more balanced view of the right. 

In his more recent, even more dense and enormous book, the one I am recommending, ‘The Matter with things; our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world’, he takes this work further, providing a detailed analysis of our current psychological, social, political, environmental and spiritual state in the West, based on rigorous scientific research, across neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, physics, and spirituality in its widest sense.

The LH and RH tend to deploy different kinds of attention; like the birds pecking for seed amongst all the other tiny things it would not want to eat, the LH has focussed, narrow attention. It looks for what is useful; what can be manipulated and controlled. It provides a representation of reality (whatever that is) such that we can survive within it, take it apart to see how it works and create machines of our own. Studies where one hemisphere is temporarily suppressed reveal strange characteristics; if asked a question to which it does not know the answer, the LH will not admit this but make up an explanation, however bizarre it might seem. It is narcissistic, self-centred and self-referential; almost a hall of mirrors. To work properly it needs to co-operate with the RH, which takes experience in directly, intuits the whole, and tolerates ambiguity and paradox.

The RH is supposed to be the Master, whilst the LH is the Emissary. But, as in the old story, where the Master sends out his Emissary to the far reaches of his domain to oversee it and report back, the Emissary has forgotten his place and tried to take over. As the Amazon review says, ‘despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences.’

Reductionism, materialism and ‘nothing buttery’

The prevailing world view of ‘the West’ in the last few hundred years has tended towards materialism; there is nothing in the universe but inert matter; to see how it works we can take it apart, breaking it into its smallest components and look; there is nothing in the universe beyond matter. Religion is an empty fable and we ourselves are of no enduring significance. We are ‘nothing but’ a few kilos of mostly carbon, water and a few other elements. Love is nothing but the action of hormones on our physical bodies. The Earth is nothing but a lump of rock spinning in an infinite void.

I do not believe this. I never did; but being very short of any religious and spiritual guidance in my younger days I didn’t know how to answer in the language of my culture.

Now, with this work, I have some idea how. I have read the two latest books linked above; that is, I have exposed my eyes to the print at least once…and I am hugely relieved that someone has done the work that I couldn’t do.

A few insights

To understand it all, you have to read the book, more times than I have done so far! But here are a few things that stood out for me, and I give the merest amateur outlines,

·         The sense of the sacred – this is the title of the last chapter in ‘The Matter with things; our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world’. Bear in mind that this is a scientific and philosophical inquiry, not an overtly ‘spiritual’ book. Dr Iain’s publishers and colleagues begged him not to write such a chapter. You will lose all credibility, they said. You will undermine your scientific credentials and respectability, they said. Happily, he did it anyway, and he reports that it was the most difficult piece of writing he ever did, yet perhaps the most satisfactory. His inquiries lead him to the point that the spiritual traditions have always known, for example ‘by love He can be caught, but by thinking never[1]’. We are not separate from Nature, but intimately joined to it, in co-creation, always drawn towards what we can intuit but never understand and grasp, ‘something outside our conceptual grasp but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of experiences we can “spiritual”’[2]. The Eastern Orthodox apophatic traditions understands this very well. It is probably a good idea to read this last chapter first, for all its exciting conclusions, and then refer back if you want to know how he arrived at them.

·         He examines ‘consciousness’. Such a study would fill libraries; the crucial question is, although we can to some extent map the physical properties of the brain, measure neurotransmitters and hormones, describe different kinds of neurones and so on, we cannot get from these observations to an explanation of how this fairly small blob of pinky goo between our ears can result in the rich experience of consciousness, aliveness and sheer awe that we all know. One image I find very telling is this; he compares a TV set to the brain, suggesting that to an observer from another planet, just as you could not tell by looking if the TV set Emitted the programmes, or Transmitted them or Permitted them, so he argues that the brain does not so much Emit consciousness as Permit it. It’s as if consciousness is ‘out there’, a fundamental property of the universe itself. I find this very exciting – especially when said by a scientist.

·         He goes on to suggest that Values, even Love, are also fundamental; that Truth is ‘not a human invention’.[3]

·         The title – The Matter with Things – contains a number of puns and paradoxes. When we say, there’s something the matter, we generally mean, there’s something wrong. Dr Iain does mean this; there is a lot wrong with the way we are attending to the world and this is leading to environmental catastrophe. But there is more; he goes into the discussion of what Matter actually is, and concurs, of course, with the physics of the last hundred years or so, that it is largely empty space, and concludes that relationships are more fundamental that what we think of as Things. He quotes a biophysicist Don Mikulecky, ‘”…it isn’t the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality; it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things we call processes which are at the core of the real world[4].’” This brings to mind for me the perichoresis, the dance, at the heart of the Trinity.

·         So, we need to see Things differently – not as solid fixed items but processes of different speeds and time scales. Compare a wave on the ocean, which to us appears very quick, with a rolling landscape, that changes like a wave but over far longer, geological timespans.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, this is a comprehensive rebuttal of reductive materialism written in language that the West itself invented. I have not read the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, but I understand that it is a thirteenth century synthesis of all theology, at a time when science and religion had not yet developed the spurious opposition that has been dreamed up in the last few hundred years.

Dr Iain’s work seems to me a modern synthesis that can point the way out of a number of terrible dilemmas and impoverished ways of being that our civilisation has fallen into. It’s a challenging read but I think it’s of crucial importance.

I end with his own words, from his equally comprehensive website,

…I search out what it is we have lost sight of, all that is there for us to see, if only we were not blinded to it: an inexhaustibly, truly wondrous, creative, living universe, not a meaningless, moribund mechanism. By bringing to bear up-to-the-minute neuropsychology, physics and philosophy, I show not only that these are in no way in conflict with one another, but that they all lead us, time and again, to the same insights. And that this is not in opposition to, but rather corroborates, the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions across the world.

All this converges on a vision that is necessary if we are to survive; and, even more importantly, if we are to deserve to survive. What I hope for my readers is that, if they are willing to accompany me on this adventure, they will never see the world in quite the same way again.

[1] ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’

[2] P 1846

[3] P1729

[4] P1541