I’d never heard of Cave before that interview. For weeks I listened to all his music on Youtube. Need to dive in again. I think you put it well: a beautiful soul. Oldfield drew out the friendship between Cave and O’Hagen beautifully; they were talking about a book they had written together about faith and non faith. It was super. @MarkD, I think it would resonate with you, well, and you, too, @Jay313. Maybe @Terry_Sampson even.
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are a post-punk band from my old days (80s-90s). I was actually surprised to learn of his spiritual side.
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That’s not been my take from the first hour of the discussion at all. If you’re not interested in his background education, you could skip to timestamp 27:59. In all the videos I’ve watched of his, his discussion of how we use the two hemispheres in ways that help and diminish our thinking and understanding are most valuable to me. It’s the case in this one as well. It’s ok if it’s not your thing, but your description is not accurate, either.
00:00 Intro
03:16 What Is sacred to you? Iain McGilchrist’s response
06:17 Growing up at Winchester College: Iain McGilchrist
15:13 Iain McGilchrist’s first impressions of Christianity, and difficulty around the word “God”
19:23 The problem with academic critique: Iain’s stint as an English Fellow at All Souls
27:59 The Origins of Iain McGilChrist’s of the Two Hemisphere Hypothesis
36:39 Unpacking Iain McGilchrist’s two hemispheres hypothesis
41:39 The consequences of living in a left hemisphere society
56:57 How we can use right hemispheric thinking to cure tribalism
01:07:09 Elizabeth’s Reflection
Full transcript: Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and Perceiving the Sacred - Theos Think Tank - Understanding faith. Enriching society.
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That’s good as I’m the same way. But I hope you don’t think I’m intent on converting you to my point of view. You’re welcome to go on disappointing me just as I will go on disappointing some of you who rather I either sign up for the standard Christian deal or just stop talking about God. Maybe the alternative for you is no more acceptable than it is for me.
All they’ve been up to down under!
Crazy what skeletons people have in their closets!
: )
Obviously, I didn’t get out much.
; )
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Thanks for that. Found the transcripts, including this part from what I included in the 1 minute clip. I especially like what Elizabeth says at the end about what IM has said about the reasons we need the word “God” if only as a place holder name for something we just understand can’t adequately be pinned down with language.
:
Elizabeth
And when you were at Winchester and going to chapel twice a day sometimes and, I’ve been listening to a lot of Tallis’ limitations this week. It’s been in my ears. Did you, you know, coming from a non–religious or not explicitly religious family? Did you feel drawn to Christianity? To God? What was the kind of journey around that for you and your teens?
Iain McGilchrist
No, I was drawn very much. So much so, that I was pretty certain that what I wanted to do after school was to study theology, and be ordained, and then go into a monastery. That was definitely my ambition. It was based on very little experience of life. And as soon as I had a little, I repented me of this idea, and good thing too I say, for me and for the monastery. I’m a bit of a rebel. I don’t like to just take things because somebody says so. So I’m often adopting another position from the one that’s fashionable in order to see what’s been lost here and to recover the valuable in it. And I often say that I’m the believer among sceptics, but I’m the sceptic amongst believers. That I often think, “well, yes, but hang on”, you know. I’ve never been one of those people who has 100% certainty about anything in the spiritual and religious realm. I go so far as to say that, you know, I admire and envy people who have that certainty. But I think there should be a bit of a question mark over it. Because these are not really realms unless one has a very, very convincing and undeniable personal experience that just absolutely convinces one. This is not an area in which 100% certainty can be had, indeed, it’s a matter of faith, and it wouldn’t be faith, if it could be certain. Faith is a matter of having trust in something. And trust is part of a relationship. And trust can be upheld, fulfilled, or it can be betrayed. And so, I see whatever it is, as a two–way relationship between God. I say the word in that slightly hesitant way because the word God is so surrounded by assumptions, and images that I think are damaging, and I’d want to distance myself from. But nonetheless, in the end, one has to call it that: God, the divine, the Sacred Realm, whatever. That it is something that is responsive to us. That we are called to respond to it. That it is always a relationship. That it is in fact to do with love. And love is another very powerful thing that can be reciprocated or can be lost. So I think it’s a good way to think. Sorry, I may have wandered off the question there.
Elizabeth
No, I love it and I am about to wander off as well. So who knows if this will stay in. But I have been trying to write a chapter on God myself, which I just finished before I started reading your chapter, The Sense of the Sacred, and the way I got round that is for most of my book, the word God is in square brackets. And then I got to you when you started talking about a non–word we need. We need an ‘un–ward’. And then trying to find those linguistic signals like in Orthodox Jews not saying the name or we need to find some way to signal that you can’t drop this into a conversation casually, and expect that it doesn’t drag with it this kind of semiotic baggage that we’ll be setting off, you know, existential fireworks in the person who’s receiving it. And I very much valued that honest wrestle. But I will try and stay on track and we’ll come back to it.
I get the feeling you and Jay at least would not miss the stridently tribal stance of so many Christians as we have seen even in this thread. I swear, as I said a day ago on that recent thread about making faith and science matter to youth - the exclusivity is toxic and could exert a push out of the faith for some Christian youth. It doesn’t look good to someone not already baked into that partisan stance.
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Also I’m very happy to hear you say this as it seems very illuminating to me too but so many people can’t get past the early, over simplified and wrong descriptions of hemispheric differences. As he is always saying, it isn’t surprising they got so much wrong early on but it doesn’t change the fact that the hemispheres are profoundly divided and we have so much more detailed scientific understanding of how the two sides operate now. Not what they do, but how they do it. Any specific function you mention will involve both hemispheres albeit they contribute differently for understandable reasons. It really is a shame so many have decided nothing new or important can be learned here when there is and it has.
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I’m so far out of the loop that the only song I remember hearing by Nick Cave was Hallelujah on a Leonard Cohen tribute album. A different version.
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- Don’t worry, I don’t.
- As I said, or tried to, I don’t feel the need to persuade others to believe exactly what I believe, and don’t take well to others’ attempt to convert me. As much of McGilchrist’s interview that I watched helped me clarify some things about him: he likes to think of himself as “a believer among skeptics, and a skeptic among believers”. I, on the other hand, think of myself as a believer among believers and skeptics, and a firm anti-relativist among relativists. Thus my moat- and double-ended drawbridge metaphor.
- Thus also my dissatisfaction with lumping the Abrahamic religions and sects under the same tent. I’m picky about who I eat and sleep with in this world.
- My primary goal in my last days in this world is getting ready for the world to come and assuring my kin that we’re going end up there, under a tent of the Father and Jesus’ making, not mine. As an avid genetic genealogist, I have a perspective strongly shaped by those who loved me better than I deserved and whom I look forward to seeing again.
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Maybe I should have already been aware of this simple phrase but I have never heard it stated quite like this.
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I hear that it is important to you and its certainly no business of mine. But I am cut from the same cloth as IM in this. I don’t feel there is much certainty available in any of this but that doesn’t stop it being very important to me.
Definitely true for me except I don’t think you are talking literally about eating and sleeping as I am. But I remain convinced that it is in everyone’s best interest to support everyone’s faith in whatever tradition they have been raised up. In those cases where someone is not firmly included in a tradition they should be encouraged toward the faith that calls to them - and please no one bring up satanism or something similarly absurd. Just because you don’t know what someone else believes is no reason to seed division and conflict.
- I wasn’t going to respond to your post because I think that we’ve each stated enough about our beliefs to convince me that they’re mostly irreconcilably different and neither of us are likely to change them in the near future.
- That’s where things stood until last night. But in response to Skov and St. Roymond’s exchange at the end of Adam’s goofy thread, I happened to do a little bit of research and came across:
- Tania Lombrozo. I think she’s on to something relevant and important. A quick Google on her name led me to this short Youtube of one of her presentations which only impressed me more with her credentials and her work product. I may be premature, but at the moment, I’m a fan.
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Agreed. But I’m curious about what you said earlier:
Have you actually gone to the UK out of curiosity about McGilchrist. Somehow I doubt it but if you have you are a bigger fan boy than I. 
Or perhaps you just meant figuratively as in following his argument? That I’ve done.
- The only time that I’ve gone to the U.K. was twice in order to change planes, to or from one going to Greece. Waiting in Heathrow Airport lasted no more than a couple of hours. McGilchrist Land was my way of summing up his milieu, where he was born, raised, and educated and what became important to him.
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An interesting interview that convinces me that I need to know a lot more on the (presumably) central thesis re left and right parts of the brain. On intuition and faith (or general belief in God), I think we need tradition for context, personal experience(s) for substance, and a specific view on the importance of attributes (such as honesty, trust, love, hatred, deceit, etc) with the importance we confer on truth, beauty, and love. Obviously faith to be authentic, it must involve the entire person; a question that pops in my mind (not sure if it is the right or left 
) is what factors, such as cleverness, intellect and talents, impact on how our left and right portions workings.
Naturally, I underscore my remarks with my belief that faith in Christ (belief in God) involves the individual and Christ, a relationship that transcends science, biology and poetry.
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Naturally and you’re in good company. I’m not looking for followers or comrades in arms for a new religious movement. I’m naturally content to follow my own drummer and extend a sincere wish for others to do the same whether that be a path with much company or very little. I don’t think we get to specify the terms on which the truth will be revealed to us. All we can do is be disposed to recognize and know the truth when it is presented to us however that should happen.
By the way @Kendel did earlier recommend the discussion of the hemisphere hypothesis in this same video/podcast which follows immediately after my one minute clip which you can switch to hear it if you like. I was relieved not to get a thorough run through of it again only because that is such familiar ground for me. Profoundly important but there is so much more to the case he makes for the necessity of God which is subtle and in my case at least was effective.
Sometime I want to wrangle over IM’s disparaging remarks about modern art, or I should say, “art he doesn’t like.”
It brings up the question of what is sacred? What does sacred mean? I think in some ways it’s like pornography. “I know it when I see it?”
I think it was in the interview I mentioned above with Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagen, the very problematic idea of “the sacred” came up. And in a book I just randomly chose on my Kindle today – Terry Eagleton’s Radical Sacrifice the first chapter, which is a study of the history, purpose and meaning of blood sacrifice, problematizes the concept of the sacred with:
Without a cement of innocent blood, writes W.H. Auden in Horae Canonicae, no secular wall will ever safely stand. The power of death is pressed into the service of the living, as thanatos for Freud conspires with eros to pluck a civilisation from the mire. In this sense, it is death that brings the value of life into focus. ‘In the experience of killing’, writes Walter Burkert in a comment on sacrifice, ‘one perceives the sacredness of life; it is nourished and perpetuated by death.’
I guess a lot of different things came together today that had to do with “the sacred.” I think I forgot a few of them, too.
But I am interested in thinking together about how one can point to some work of art and declare the presence of sacredness, and to another the presence of profanity.
And how do we understand what “art” is, as well?
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I’d love to hear you ask him that question yourself at one of his Q&A session which he does 3 or 4 times a year for those who have signed on to be part of an extended community (nothing like church, in either a good or a bad way). If you wanted to make a video of yourself asking it I’d be happy to propose it. Not sure how long until he holds another. I did enjoy sharing the Jayber Crow quote with him one time and asking another question too. Naturally the odds of having ones question accepted are small given the number of participants but it does happen. I do think he is interested in art criticism as well as the literary kind though he is famously against using other people’s richly personal and layered creations as trampolines on which ‘experts’ show off their cleverness while reducing the work to something general and boring.
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You actually anticipate the gist of the difference between the two hemispheres in what you wrote. The left hemisphere is that which represents our own best efforts to understand and explain the world through our own deliberative efforts making use of the models and maps we’ve created or adopted about the world. The right hemisphere is the hemisphere which attends not to our own thinking but to the world itself as it presents itself to us, in whatever form that may take. Evolutionarily the left can be thought of as the center that attends narrowly to getting what is needed from the world by recognizing familiar opportunities and employing well practiced procedures while the right is the center which evolved to keep broadly vigilant to possible risks and unusual opportunities. In a nutshell the left evolved to get dinner, the right to avoid becoming dinner.
As for the many philosophic and science results he employs in his case building up to the sacred several are discussed in this video. Definitely not all inclusive but a fairly succinct presentation of those covered in this 39 minute video. Part two is 31 minutes.
The interview with Iain McGilchrist that Elizabeth Oldfield did has made her one of my favourite persons (although there are many) and Iain’s portrayal of his childhood made me quite sad about the direction my childhood took, because despite the adventures that I had, the numerous places I lived in, and the lessons that being initially working class, then an “army brat” as we were called, gave me, I was a “lost boy.” I experienced the spirit of the school Iain attended in Barnstable in Devon and was whisked away by circumstances that I couldn’t control, and I felt thrown into an environment in which I was just a “problem child,” who couldn’t keep up with the curriculum, was out of sync with social habits there, and was all too sensitive. I was, in a way, very much like Iain portrays himself, and many of his attributes that were at least accepted, and at best encouraged in his environment, were met with disinterest in mine, except with my mother, who tried, despite a lack of education, to help me progress. I fled England in the end, for a destination in which I had the feeling that I could expand and grow, which I then did.
Iain’s early intention to study theology, be ordained and then go into a monastery, sounds a lot like a fleeting desire that kindled in me for a short time, despite knowing nothing about studying, about theology or about monasteries. It just seemed like an escape. But what was interesting is his approach to literature which quite amazingly, was something that I had picked up at that early stage in Barnstable, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, that literature has the task of taking us on a journey and letting us experience things in our mind, from which we can learn. This, as Elisabeth then quipped, leads us to think “about how we read scripture and that I want to imagine someone who’s already written the against criticism for scripture, you know, don’t dissect it into dry doctrines, just let it work on work on you …” which curiously, is how I later approached the Bible.
The strange thing was that, although I was criticised once Christians realised what I was doing, I was having what is often termed as “spiritual experiences” and the hair was rising on the nape of my neck, or in my case my ears turned red, and the impressions needed expression. The literalism that I was practising was acting “as if” it was literally true, like when reading a novel, and going with the story and, importantly, then coming out of it. That was what separated me from the evangelical Christians I was with, but when I went to the protestant church, my experience lame, and my enthusiasm waned, and as Iain says:
“I rather blame I’m afraid the church. I mean in a way they were in a conundrum; they saw congregations dropping, how can we entice people back? By making it all more mundane, and more like life at home, and more simple and more popular? But actually, what people crave is not more of what’s going on at home, because that’s exactly what they are finding is not satisfying. They want to be told there’s something here that will take patience, silence, prayer, some singing and going through rituals, and then you may see it, and you won’t get it by sitting outside it and going, well you do this you do that. I always say it’s like learning to swim by sitting on the bank with a book and saying, okay now I understand, I’ll get in the water and swim. You have to get in the water and swim to understand swimming and I’m afraid the spiritual life is like that.”
Like him, my experience with mindfulness in MBSR training was enormously helpful, and developing a contemplative practise out of that, at first, I overcame the challenge I had of not fitting into the available Christian environments. The practise involved silencing the chatter, reciting words, or verses, but leaving space, and listening rather than speaking. I especially identify with Iain’s comparison with gardening, which I have recently discovered. However, my problem is that, using Iain’s terminology, I am deeply right hemispheric, and although I have a natural inclination to express myself in language, whether English or German, and am deeply moved by language, my experience of life as something so very complex, ambiguous, mysterious, and awesome often evades language, and I struggle to find words. When confronted with my superior’s very left-hemispheric approach to business, despite being in the business of caring, nursing, and ministering to people, the conflict only had one casualty – me.
But Elisabeth’s reflection, being thankful that Iain went to that school, and talking about how important formation is, made me think that a sense of homecoming after being abroad is so valuable. Formation, yes, but it is so valuable to gain an external view of home. That is where I am, outside of England, reflecting on the foundation my mother tried to give me, how I broke away and came back mentally to appreciate it. I don’t know if a seed was planted before I found a booklet on Abraham, but something is there if you are a right-hemispheric type of person, so perhaps that was it.
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