The Tyranny of Left-Hemisphere Thinking

How neuroscience helps explain the ills of our technopoly

In my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, the eponymous protagonist Kate Montclair, gravely ill with inoperable Stage IV brain cancer, is offered, by a friend, access to the drugs that will allow her to take her own life. Kate’s thoughts at first go “wobbly” at the prospect, but then a more considered view takes shape in her mind:

“‘Assisted suicide,’ as it is called, is not an issue I had ever paid much attention to. Flickering through my mind were images from an old 60 Minutes episode I had watched in school that featured a gaunt and gruesome Dr. Kevorkian with his crew cut, portable apparatus, and van. The legality, not to mention the ethics, of the thing had always struck me as preposterous. Of course we should be able to do whatever we want with our bodies. Why should anyone have the power to dictate to us when we die?”

Soon afterwards Kate, with the help of her friend Adele, makes the decision to pursue an assisted suicide. Justifying it to herself she thinks:

“I was not contemplating suicide. Adele was right: the tumor in my brain was killing me; I was simply choosing to confront the killer on my own terms. In the open field.”

In these reflections Kate manifests a mode of thinking about herself and her illness that shows her to be under the tyranny of left-hemisphere thinking.

Here I draw, not for the first time, upon ideas found in Iain McGilchrist’s work, especially his fascinating book, The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. His chief interest, and the central theme of The Master and His Emissary, is the relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain and how that relationship has helped produce the vast and debilitating cultural changes that have swept over the West in the past 400 years, the changes that we mark by the terms “modernity” and “postmodernity.”

A rough paraphrase of McGlichrist’s argument is as follows:

Granted a nuanced interconnection between the two hemispheres of the brain, it is still fair to say that the left hemisphere is the sphere that emphasizes analysis, the breaking of things and ideas into their parts, and the consequent computation and manipulation of those parts for the sake of some desired result; the right hemisphere, by contrast, approaches reality in more holistic, intuitive fashion, emphasizing interconnectivity, beauty, awe, and meaning.

For McGilchrist, the two hemispheres represent two fundamentally distinct ways of attending to the world. And one way of describing what has happened in the West in the past 400 years is to say that our attention has been severely contracted as we have pursued a wholesale cultural reduction of human thinking and activity to the purview of the left hemisphere.

In short, Western culture has fallen under the tyranny of left-hemisphere thinking.

McGilchrist’s way of putting our cultural problem is itself reductionistic, in that it makes no real distinction between brain and mind—but let’s put that issue aside for the time being, as McGilchrist is onto something valuable. His point is that mainstream culture now looks upon reality as if with one blind eye. What it sees is only that which can be broken into parts and manipulated for the ends of convenience, psychological well-being, personal authenticity, and wealth.

McGilchrist’s thesis is connected to Neil Postman’s concept of technopoly that I wrote about last weekend. Recall that, for Postman, a technopoly is defined as that phase of culture in which the ideology of progress-through-technology eliminates all alternatives to itself. A “grand reductionism,” results. All forms of cultural life must submit to the sovereignty of technology.

The tyranny of left-hemisphere thinking, as described by McGilchrist, and the grand reductionism that characterizes a technopoly, as described by Postman, are the same phenomenon. Technopoly comes about just because left-hemisphere thinking has reduced everything to the analysis and manipulation of material parts for the sake of efficiency, personal authenticity, wealth, and the like.

And it is exactly through the lens of the left hemisphere’s tyranny that my protagonist, Kate Montclair, understands the predicament of her illness. “Of course we should be able to do whatever we want with our bodies. Why should anyone have the power to dictate to us when we die?” Kate’s body is a machine that is breaking down in a particularly painful way. What is the point of enduring its slow demise? What reason could there be not to exercise one’s last act of dominion over such a fatally compromised contraption and, with the help of medical technology, destroy it completely?

In McGilchrist’s terms, the tyranny of left-hemisphere thinking is a betrayal of the holistic mindset of the right hemisphere. For the right hemisphere, the body is not a machine that is somehow, in mysterious Cartesian fashion, connected to the real me. My body is me. And because it is me, it is integral to how I see and experience reality. The human body helps disclose the meaning of human life.

And if this is so, then we are faced with a new and marvelous prospect: that the suffering of the body is itself a way of seeing and of finding meaning. Suffering, we might say, has wisdom to impart to us.

Euthanasia is a rising threat in our culture. To respond to it, we need first to be aware of how deeply we are entrenched in the way of attending characteristic of the left hemisphere. Beyond that, we need to learn a new way of attending, a way that sees the body, even its suffering, as a bearer of meaning and wisdom.

Another character in my novel, like Kate Montclair also gravely ill, gives voice to this new way of attending, a way that has led her to identify her suffering with that of Christ:

“What a strange, alien life I have led. What a senseless, pointless, unbearable, heart-rending life. But I will go inside it now, through the black hole caked with black, desiccated blood and drenched in the stew of his sweat. I will feel my way through the nerves and blood vessels of the wound, through the cartilage and muscle all the way down to the bone.

“Though I cannot see my way, I trust, Lord, that you see the way. Beyond all my feelings, I trust. Beyond all my brokenness, I trust.”

What, then, happens to Kate Montclair? I will leave her story to your reading.

For all you Christendom College alumni, students, faculty, and staff out there, please know that next Saturday, October 7, as part of the Homecoming activities at Christendom College, I will be giving a brief reading from The Good Death of Kate Montclair, as well as selling and signing copies of the book. The event is FREE and begins at 12:15 p.m. in Killians. A pizza lunch will be provided. Here’s the sign-up form.

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If you can’t make the event in Front Royal on October 7, please know that on Saturday, November 4 I will also be selling and signing books at the “fall party on the farm” for club members of Ox-Eye Vineyards in Augusta County, Virginia, just outside the charming city of Staunton. Ox-Eye Vineyards is owned by my friend Susan Kiers and her husband John, and Ox-Eye wine has been a favorite of mine and of my wife Amy since we first sipped a glass back in the fall of 2011. In fact, my love for Ox-Eye--in particular the pinot noir--inspired me to depict my protagonist, Kate Montclair, enjoying a glass of it: “I unpacked, readied the guest room for Lisa, threw in a load of laundry, and then took to the front porch to eat a lunch of locally sourced veggies, fruit, and cheese for protein, complemented with a glass of Ox-Eye pinot noir, my favorite Virginia wine, redolent of a pioneer smokehouse” (The Good Death of Kate Montclair, p. 41).

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What am I reading?

I’m always reading lots of things. But these days the book I most look forward to returning to at the end of the day is Holly Ordway’s new spiritual biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien’s Faith (Word on Fire Academic, 2023). Especially given that this past summer I visited the Birmingham Oratory where Tolkien spent so much of his boyhood, reading the account of his early life has been a special treat. This book is not just for those who have a special interest in Tolkien’s fantasy fiction. Fundamentally, it’s a marvelous story of how providence guided a young orphan boy through an epic quest in living the Catholic faith.