A Revolution in Thought? How Hemisphere Theory Helps us Understand the Metacrisis
Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.
I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot see that it is limited. We no longer seem to recognise what it is we do not know, what our way of being in the world is pushing out of our lives and out of our world. To understand what is going on we need a breadth of view that is increasingly rare. It is the possibility of this that I intend to explore here today.
The question of historical cycles cycles back from time to time. Lately, in presenting the topic to non-specialist students for purposes of futurology, I favored these four authors: Peter Turchin, Jarod Diamond, Ian Morris, Peter Pogany. Of the many dozens of cyclical theories out there (Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley, Ibn Khaldun …) why those four? The common grounding of my four horsemen is a) foundations in population biology, b) empirical, statistical approach, c) general lack of inevitability - because not all cycles cycle on expected schedule, or even at all.
Meanwhile, I’m currently studying McGilchrist, admire Vervaeke, and am learning psychology essentially in direct tutorial from Gregg Henriques, so I’m at least conversant in cognitive theory. Civilizational history was my original professional focus from nearly 50 years ago however, so this time McGilchrist is playing on turf with which I am already quite familiar.
A proper response to McGilchrist’s theory of civilization cycles would require its own article, at least as substantial as the one he presented to the Cambridge Journal. At the minimum, I plan to spend some time at least outlining what such a response might be. My motivation for that is because my own preferred metacrisis analysis integrates the psychologists (McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Henriques, many others) with the social empiricists (Peter Turchin, Jarod Diamond, Ian Morris, Peter Pogany), but not in the direct and quasi-causal manner suggested by McGilchrist’s latest article. Mine is not a psychological theory of civilizational history. Rather, it’s a theory of how psychology informs social action on what Henriques calls the culture-person plane.
An example of how such a connection can be made from the cultural-material to the personal and psychological occurred in Pogany’s final work, Havoc: Thy Name is Twenty-First Century. In that work, Pogany moved from “chaotic transition” (our current civilizational state) to a new world order grounded in the Gebserian integral structure of consciousness. Gebser and the Second Law of Theormodynamics don’t usually fit into the same book, but Pogany dropped enough hints, that with a few more theoretical nuts and bolts (different topic for a different day), I was able to visualize a firm connection. So it’s not like ideas can’t be influenced by grounded, energetic social processes. And it’s not like ideas and thinking themselves can’t redirect energy. It’s just that the transmission mechanisms are nearly never so simple as “X therefore Y”. Which leads us back to McGilchrist’s latest …
Looking for historical analogies to our current situation, McGilchrist adduces Greece circa 6th C BCE, Rome at the end of the Republic, and the (first) Renaissance. (2R fans take note - per McGilchrist, 1R was not on the side of the cultural angles!) Sorting through those analogies and cross-correlating them with my social-theoretical foundation authors will be a project for later summer. For the time being, I just want to drop a hint about where such a project is likely to lead. On first impression, the civilizational historian which whom McGilchist best aligns is Pitirim A. Sorokin. Sorokin’s ideational, idealistic, and sensate cultures seem approximate to what McGilchrist is describing here. No time for Sorokin in this post … just a bread crumb for any eager to scout the trail in advance … https://www.john-uebersax.com/pdf/SorokinCulturalOrientations.pdf
@RobertBunge this is great.
Given your knowledge / interest i would love to invite you to start outlining (maybe in a gdoc to start with and then can be posted here) some summaries of key concepts you refer to e.g. i would love to see a good “wiki” entry on:
- Spengler and his Decline of the West
- Toynbee and a Study of History
- Quigley
- Ibn Khaldun
I’ve also been reading Turchin, Diamond (both major books), Ian Morris (recently read 2 of his works).
I personally am a sceptic of McGilchrist’s cycles – or, at best, think he is projecting onto 1-d (left/right) what is at least 2 dimensions (the spiral helix of cultural paradigm evolution).
Challenge accepted! Me and my legal pad were on it already yesterday! An outline is ready to roll out anytime. Maybe a very quick sketch/synopsis here first, with a Google doc and other larger elements to follow.
Here is an outline for what might become a book, a university course (or more), or an extended series on social media. I’m putting it out this way first, so anyone who wants a right-brained Gestalt of the larger argument they can see it all in one go. Smaller, more focused productions (like wiki entries on specific authors) can then follow.
-----------------------outline----------------------------
What Does the World Need: From History to the Global Future
A. The Historical Record - why did civilizations emerge, grow, decline and collapse?
- C. Quigey on “instruments of expansion”
- Limits
i. Turchin - elite overproduction
ii. Diamond - environment exhaustion
iii. Morris - hard limits
iv. Pogany - entropy and chaotic transitions - Secular Growth
i. Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns
ii. Turchin’s metaethnic frontiers
B. Cycles in Culture
- Spengler - organic metaphor of birth, aging, death
- Toynbee - genesis and breakdown
- Sorokin - sensate, ideational, idealistic
- McGilchrist - left-brained/right-brained cultures
- Gebser - “deficent” cultures prior to new mutations
C. Psychology and Cultural Emergence
- Habermas on cognitive dissonance and the axial emergence
- Pogany - a new common sense for each emergent world order
- McGilchrist, Vervaeke, and others on the mechanics of how the dialectics of cultural contradiction play out in the person (and feed back again in cultural transformation).
D. Current Civilization - One or Many?
- D. Wilkerson on “central civilization”
- Wallerstein on the modern world system
- Kultur vs. Zivilization in German thought
- Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”
- The persistence of civilizational pluralism - comparative modernizations and developmental pathways around the world
E. The Material “Push”
- UTOK and the emergence of ontic layers
- Azarian, Dempsey, Hoel, complexity theory, autopoeisis
- Limits to Grown, Hagens and the Carbon Pulse, Planetary Boundaries
- The 5th Joint Point - AI, human, or Gaian?
F. The Spiritual “Pull”
If this ever gets written, it will be very theology heavy! Very woo!
G. Action Models
- D. Meadows on systemic leverage points
- K Karatani on the Borromean Knot of Capital-Nation-State
- When the modern “instrument of expansion” hits the planetary boundaries …
- Karatani’s commentary on Kant’s Perpetual Peace
- Pogany on strong multilaterialism
- My quick synopsis of way too many change models: communicate, cooperate, collaborate (3Cs)
- The 2R change model (outlined by @rufuspollock ) for mapping optimal systemic leverage in the direction of the 3Cs
-------------------end of outline------------------------
If I live another 20 years, maybe that gets turned into a book. (Probably not.) But if anyone has curiosity about this or that section of the overall argument, I’ll be happy to draft an essay or two sooner rather than later.
@Asimong , @JonahW I’m ready to make wiki entries on all these (and quite a few more). Just not sure about the mechanics. How exactly should such wiki authoring work?
I shared some initial suggestions for guidance here … Structure of this wiki - Second Renaissance
If you like, try just one and solicit feedback from me and others.
Whatever you do it will be most welcome!
One of the principles of most wikis is that you expect others to modify your input ad lib. One of the nice features of Mediawiki is that you can set alerts to watch any pages you choose, to be emailed when anyone edits them. So even mistaken edits are easily reverted and forgiven.
I’m now away for a couple of weeks but keeping up occasionally with e-mail.
What I am keen to promote, in alignment with a multi perspectival paradigm, is explicit encouragement for any of us colleagues to add our own perspectives on any page. I suggest we call this section of the page, “Commentary”. If we can manage this, it promises an increasingly rich resource for all.
The main caveat I offer is that we don’t want anonymous edits, but only from people who are visible here. This we can develop a good collective collaboration.
What I’m running into is the Wiki link appears to want a different username/password than the Forum. I’m logged into the Forum, but the Wiki does not know who I am and rejects my Forum credentials. Also, there is a Wiki category on the Forum itself.
So the issue is getting the content pipeline flowing … what are the precise mechanics? THX.
sorry for the unintended brevity above! I tried replying by e-mail but it apparently didn’t work. What I was trying to say was…
we were just talking about this yesterday and yes it is less than ideal, we should have some sort of single sign on. At present everyone needs to register separately for the wiki.
does this help? Getting started - Second Renaissance
My recommendation is to draft in google docs or similar that allows for good commenting and suggesting and then when ready we can transfer to wherever wiki ends up being as per Forum/wiki discussion meeting for development of strategy in this area
OK, so I just made a Google doc out of the outline. As a social writing experiment, I ma elyaborate sections from time to time depending on how questions and discussions flow around here. Also, if anyone else is feeling it and want to write their own bits in there, that would be interesting!
Update: having started the outline in Google, I could not resist drafting a few paragraphs. This thing may grew into a real paper by-the-by. But no hurry.
OK, so here is my personal 2R “instrument of expansion” (see new wiki entry on Carroll Quigley):
- made a wiki account
- edited my wiki user data
- made a Carroll Quigley page
- assigned the Carroll Quigley page to the People category in the wiki.
If there are any process flaws to any of that, please advise …
Meanwhile, it struck me that my motivation to just generate a lot of wiki entries is pretty low. My creative energies flow from wholes to parts. So for the total “instrument of expansion”, I needed the Gestalt up and running first, which Gestalt can then be parsed into its pieces. As enough Gestalt to get started, I posted an outline and few paragraphs here:
What I really want is for people to engage with content in the Google doc draft, and to use the wiki as reference support for that. My authoring plan, therefor, will be to add content a bit at a time to the Google doc, and then post wiki articles as reference notes to the doc.