This resource has been extracted from our
Reading Workshop discussion on Iain McGilchrist's
The Master and his Emissary. This will be uploaded in two parts as the files are very large.
Part Two of this book (Chapters 6-Conclusion) looks at the history of Western culture in the light of how the hemispheres perceive the world. McGilchrist suggests that if the world is not independent of our observation of it, attention to it, and interaction with it, and if the mind is at least mediated by the brain, it seems reasonable that the brain will have left its mark on the world we have brought about.
Attention to these aspects of cultural history is examined from the development of writing & currency in ancient Greece, the extraordinary flowering of both science and the arts at the time. McGilchrist posits that this is related to enhanced frontal lobe function, increased independence of the hemispheres with characteristic advances in function which was in harmony for a while. This then led to increasing difficulties in co-operation with the resultant instability evidenced by more extreme positions and further toward the part-world created by the left hemisphere. The reverses are followed over time, identified by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Romanticism & the Industrial Revolution to Modernism & Post-Modernism of our current era.
In our workshop, we also examined the art, myths and architecture that arose just after the period of the Dark Ages (the Gothic cathedrals, Grail stories, the legends of King Arthur etc.) which McGilchrist doesn't cover, but is indeed a fantastic period of history to pore through. We took a bit of a detour to explore the
Reformation (as well as the folkways of the waves of migration to the US from England in the book
Albion's Seed) in more detail and the lasting effects it has had on society to this day. All in all, a fascinating journey in time exploring art, architecture, religion and culture from the lens of McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis.
There is so much to unpack in this book, I highly recommend reading it!
A huge thanks to @placematt for editing and putting these together, and to @987baz for creating the music!
