## Metadata - Author: [[Roderick Tweedy]] - Full Title: The God of the Left Hemisphere - Category: #books ## Highlights - almost uniquely in the eighteenth-century, the so-called “Age of Reason”, he recognised and argued that beneath the rational processes and values there lay a form of actual insanity. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=135)) - Throughout recent popular culture (from Elvis Presley to The Matrix) there is an astonishing if unsurprising (unsurprising that is to anyone not incarcerated in mainstream academic, economic, or scientific institutions) urge to resist being treated as automatic, isolated, joyless, obedient computers. Moreover, there are contained within the very holy, sacred texts of the rational left-brain world prophecies and disturbing knowledge that the reign of the usurping, rational, judgmental, authoritarian Sky Gods, is finite. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1136)) - As we have seen, the right mind is committed to the expression of peace, inter-involved love, and humanity in the world, because that is how it experiences existence, because that is what existence is,—once we are freed from the domineering and inhibiting structures and mechanisms of the left brain. As the second part of this book will I hope suggest, it is not the left hemisphere in itself which is the problem so much as its dominance and its urge to dominate. ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1154)) - Blake presents the materialistic and functionalist programs of contemporary rationality as a self-serving and self-reflecting interpretation of reality, one which distorts and conceals as much as it explains and reveals. Blake treats this aspect of Urizenic interpretation as essentially “religious” precisely because of this inability of reason to get beyond its own programs or conceptual parameters: it is compelled to see existence in its own graven image, that is to say, according to its own indwelling and inherent processes and compulsions. ([Location 1332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1332)) - the left hemisphere constructs not so much an “objective” world view but rather a world of “objects”: of conceptual, quantifiable “pieces” (usually called “building blocks”), and everything which it encounters it interprets solely in a language of function, use, and discrete quantity, reflections of itself. ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1351)) - Rational knowledge works by looking back and by isolating (i.e., altering) systems, and by filtering out. Abstraction is all about forgetting things, about leaving things out. As if these cognitive limitations weren’t constrictive enough however, reason is not even aware of the constrictions. Precisely because it is trapped it does not know it is trapped: hence the “hall of mirrors” in which it finds itself, in McGilchrist’s analogy. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1359)) - in The Four Zoas Blake suggests that the “Rational Power” itself can see that it has become entrapped within its own ratios and mechanistic programming (FZ vi:196, p. 349). Reason recognises that the world it has created is not only useful, but also completely joyless. ([Location 1397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1397)) - as Blake’s earliest prose pamphlets attempt to set out, reason can only work by limiting itself: by establishing a closed, finite system, and then analysing and distinguishing its parts (NNR, pp. 2–3). This is, after all, its modus operandi, and part of its hugely successful analytical capacity. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1399)) - as Blake remarked, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (MHH 4, p. 34). ([Location 1404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1404)) - Reason, like a one-eyed myopic deity, cannot see itself as a way of seeing, only as the way of seeing. ([Location 1421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1421)) - Without this belief—and, as we shall see, it is a belief (or as a scientist would say, it is “only” a belief)—in something “substantial” and “rock-like” upon which to construct its elaborate rationalistic edifices, the left brain becomes prey to the most paranoid and destabilising uncertainty. Without its precious (fictional) “building blocks” it feels to the rationalising program that its immense computational and evaluative processes have nothing to stand on, therefore no “under-standing”, no “sub-stance” (and therefore no substance), and therefore as if they were immaterial, “base-less”—well, you get the idea. ([Location 1457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1457)) - For Reason’s attempt to disengage its own body, to sever and mechanise its own humanity, to conceal its own metaphors and its own values, lies for Blake at the heart of contemporary Urizenic dominance. ([Location 1525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1525)) - The world according to reason is, more crudely put, neither objective nor non-evaluative. It is a peculiarly manipulating and manipulative way of seeing things, a singular or myopic vision that cannot even see itself, a profoundly limited form of programmed processing, and ultimately a rather deluded methodology which imposes its own image onto all of existence and then sees in its returned reflection a justification for its authority. Having banished the poets and imagination from its world, materialism is simply left with machines and information processing, a Urizenic hall of mirrors. ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1718)) - Galileo Galilei, as one of the architects of the new R2 operating system of the left brain, introduced a more internally coherent and consistent rationality, made it even more literalistic and mathematical in nature, changed the status of scientific models from being metaphors and useful hypotheses into being statements of absolute “truth”, and helped to introduce a new tone into the scientific project: intellectually superior, dogmatic, intolerant of alternative modes of knowledge and attention, and sanctimonious. Many of these innovative applications were unfortunately merely refinements and continuations of the medieval Church’s default operating system: dogmatic, literalist, and unconscious of its own mode of belief. Like rival and occasionally clashing operating systems, over the subsequent generations R1 and R2 have slogged it out for what Dawkins would probably call meme dominance, market supremacy. ([Location 1999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=1999)) - It is a hallmark feature of the competitive left brain to present rival versions of basically the same product: VHS vs. Beta, Tories vs. Labour, Democrats vs. Republican, Pepsi Cola vs. Coca Cola. ([Location 2015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2015)) - one of the most recognisable features of Urizenic programming is its desperate superiority complex: its compulsive need to feel superior, to gain power, to brook no other ways of seeing or interpreting. ([Location 2023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2023)) - Traditional religions offered not so much comfort, as certainty and potential security (if one obeyed). This deep need for certainty also drove Galileo—as we have seen—and many other “left-brain” scientists and philosophers, such as Descartes and Locke. According to this view, the real secret of the immensely powerful hold of R1 for so long was its cogent and coherent portrayal of a highly disciplined, ordered universe, controlled by an unswerving and objective set of Laws, usually embodied in some sort of personalised or personified Lawmaker. (“I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!”, as Shelley summed up this continuing piece of ISA in The Mask of Anarchy, Reiman & Powers, 1977, p. 302). It is these laws which stabilise the Urizenic operating system, and produce the basis—the “rock”—for its believers: the illusion of certainty and solidity that provides the comfort for belief both in science and in religion. Thus Urizen declares, in a statement that is almost a declaration of the fundamental program of the Urizenic OS (ordering, quantifiable, uniform, systematic, and hierarchical): Lo! I unfold my darkness: and on This rock, place with strong hand the Book Of eternal brass, written in my solitude .… One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure One King, One God, one Law. ([Location 2130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2130)) - This was and is, I believe, the source of its “comfort”: early Urizenic religious codes (R1) provided a clear and fairly logical set of rules and prescriptions to be followed, and an abstract and invisible Law-maker to enforce them. And this is perhaps also the main, if rarely stated, psychological appeal of modern science. ([Location 2144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2144)) - This section has explored the links between orthodox religion and orthodox science, locating both of them in deeply entrenched Urizenic operating systems. It has traced some of the main features of the Urizenic programs and models which it imposes on the world and shown how it tends to interpret everything it encounters according to its own indwelling processes and powers: the building blocks, the machines, the superiority complex, the manipulation, and the literalism, that are defining hallmarks of the R2 OS. ([Location 2170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2170)) - Galileo is a key figure in the development of the Urizenic agenda, and the shift from R1 to R2, not so much because of his heliocentric theory but because he changed the position of hypotheses, and with it the character of science itself. He took much of the dogmatism, seriousness, and sanctimonious of the Roman Catholic Church, and applied it to the new scientific project. Above all, he made science literal. That is, he modernised, or “rationalised”, the already strikingly literalist reading of the world that had characterised medieval religion, rejecting these rather absurd readings as “superstitious”, and promoting instead an increasingly ‘left brain’ science, one that busied itself on making the whole universe completely and consistently literal, and increasingly in its own self image. ([Location 2174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2174)) - “dramatises in various forms a battle between two powerful forces that adopt different guises: the single-minded, limiting, measuring, mechanical power of what Blake called Ratio, the God of Newton, and the myriad-minded, liberating power of creative imagination, the God of Milton.” In this, he adds, Blake voices “the brain’s struggle to ward off domination by the left hemisphere” ([Location 2261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2261)) - Given that the right hemisphere has ontological as well as epistemological primacy, many of the left-brain activities and characteristics might be seen as a sort of copy or rationalised “version” of original, prior right-brain ones. What was once apprehended as a living whole, for example, becomes analysed and re-presented as “systems” made out of “building blocks”: at best a rather lifeless “network”, at worst, an assemblage of parts, like Frankenstein’s monster. Such a version of reality, Blake contended, was not only a dream and a forgetting however, but an assault on the right-hemispheric, “imaginative” mode of human experience and apprehension. And for him it was more than that: it was a parody, a rationalising “mockery” of reality, one that not only claimed to be the primary source of knowledge about the world but which also actively discredited the prior imaginative states of knowledge. And its most daring and perhaps obvious manifestation of this aspect of the left hemisphere is its desire, or need, to incarnate itself as a machine. This again keys into its literalised, rationalised, computerised version of reality. It seeks to incarnate, not as a human being but as almost an anti-human non-being. One of the most characteristic and telling aspects of the left hemisphere mode of interpreting the world, and therefore of being in the world, is the way it consistently transforms living experience into a mechanised version of itself. This is partly made manifest in its default program of converting sensuous experience into “information processing”: into discrete bits or bytes that can be reassembled and ordered around: virtual maps, codes, lifeless representational and abstract pointers to a presumed “outside” world. This was largely the project of R2: to establish a coherent representational world, usually called the mechanical philosophy, before extending this mechanical arm directly into the world in order to reshape it according to its inherent mechanomorphic principle. The left hemisphere materialises into the world physically, through its fondness for manufacturing: the manufacture of literal versions of its internal cerebral machinery—the external robots and inert and malleable automata that, like the judges on reality TV shows, it loves to be surrounded by. ([Location 2501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2501)) - The left brain is indeed the hemisphere designed to design: one could say that the way it operates is machine-like, were this not to put the cart before the horse: machines are like it. ([Location 2519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2519)) - McGilchrist observes that “the left hemisphere appears to see the body as an assemblage of parts” and notes that, remarkably, patients with right hemisphere strokes often report their own bodies as being “rectilinear, compartmentalised, inanimate, and hollow.” He also observes that certain forms of madness, such as schizophrenia, are characterised “by an excessively detached, hyper-rational, reflexively self-aware, disembodied and alienated condition” in which “one’s own body becomes no longer the vehicle through which reality is experienced, but instead it is seen as just another object, sometimes a disturbingly alien object”, in a world full of other “devitalised machines”. ([Location 2525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2525)) - the left hemisphere seems to operate as a sort of rationalised “version” of the right brain. It turns its metaphors into literalism, its bodies into machinery, and its right-hemispheric experience of eternity into an endless stretch of linear time. ([Location 2552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2552)) - We might be persuaded by the fact that the left hemisphere provides a detailed and precise picture, to suppose that it, rather than its irritatingly imprecise counterpart, gives us the truth about the world. And its less engaged stance might be a clue that it is more trustworthy. However, the fact that disengaged attention is in some cases psychopathic tells us that the question has meaning for the value, including the moral value, of the world we experience. [M&E, p. 176] ([Location 2582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2582)) - “‘To lose one’s reason’ is the old expression for madness. But an excess of rationality is the grounds of another kind of madness, that of schizophrenia” (M&E, p. 403, p. 332). ([Location 2590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2590)) - Blake was living during the first “War on Terror”, the British establishment’s war with post-revolutionary France, which is where the modern word “terrorist” was first coined to describe supporters of the revolutionary government in France. In the 1790s booksellers were thrown into jail simply for selling the works of Thomas Paine, also considered to be a “terrorist”. ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2602)) - none of the hundreds of Australian Aboriginal languages have a word for “possession”; in Native American cultures such as the Cree Indian, there is not even a verb “to own”, and there seems to be generally little interest in either status, competitiveness, or property (ibid., p. 148, p. 154). There is not even evidence of competitiveness in games: an amusing and perhaps revealing illustration of this is suggested by the story of the European colonists who tried to introduce competitive sports to the natives: “In New Guinea, boys were forced to play football in mission schools, but instead of going all out to win by as many goals as possible, they usually carried on until scores were level”, apparently much to the dismay of the Urizenic priests (ibid. p. 154). ([Location 2770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2770)) - Note: Steve taylor 2005 - As Taylor notes, “archaeological studies throughout the world have found almost no evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history—that is, right from the beginning of the human race until 8000 BCE” (Taylor, 2005, p. 31). This lack of archaeological evidence of war (absence of weapons, absence of cave art depictions of warfare, weapons, or warriors, absence of any burial signs of violent or brutal deaths, and so on) is striking. As Bernard Campbell observes “it was not until the development of the temple towns (around 5000 BC) that we find evidence of inflicted death and warfare. This is too recent an event to have had any influence on the evolution of human nature” (cited in Leakey, 1981, p. 242). ([Location 2781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2781)) - The myth of man as “natural born killer” or “killer ape” might sell cinema tickets, assuage insecure alpha males, and appeal to the predatory and ruthless programs of the dissociated left brain, but it is an untenable hypothesis. And, as Leakey notes, it is also a dangerous one: “I am convinced that it is not correct, and that this popular notion of the ‘killer-ape’ is one of the most dangerous and destructive ideas that mankind has ever had”: ([Location 2788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2788)) - Indeed, the unconscious resonance of “pyramidic” logic and symbolism has recently been picked up by John Taylor Gatto in his penetrating analysis of contemporary educational practice in America. Gatto was awarded New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 for his remarkable and successful teaching practices in New York, and then promptly gave a speech pointing out that contemporary educational practice in America was less to do with learning and the acquisition of knowledge than preparing students to conform and accept their place in an ideological “pyramid”. He observed that “school, as it was built, is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control. School is an artifice that makes such a pyramidical social order seem inevitable” (Gatto, 2005, pp. 13). In this sense, he suggested, schools are not actually failing but succeeding: “Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.” This “Egyptian” or post-Babylonian model for society, he notes, is also, and intrinsically, related to the psychological demands and character of the economy, based on the fabrication of aspiration and “reward-punishment” conditioning: “an ancient Egyptian idea symbolized by the pyramid with an eye on top, the one that’s on the other side of George Washington on our one-dollar bill. Everyone is a stone defined by its position on the pyramid” (Gatto, 2005, pp. 13–14, p. 68). Gatto adds that schooling (he prefers this word to the term “education” since education implies awareness and self-growth), employs the rhetoric of aspiration and the possibility of economic advancement, an economic or Babylonian “dream” that sustains this construction, whilst actually delivering a reality of deepening social stratification and personal and social impoverishment. “At bottom it signals the worldview of minds obsessed with the control of other minds, obsessed by dominance and strategies of intervention to maintain that dominance” (ibid., p. 68). If this is the mindset of the élites who currently sit on top of the pyramid it contrasts sharply with those interred inside. As David Albert points out in his introduction to Gatto’s book, according to the U.S. Department of Labour’s own statistics, after all of this compulsory state education “the job that is held by the largest number of individuals, as well as the occupation that has shown the greatest growth in the past 30 years, is that of Wal-Mart clerk. Second is McDonald’s burger flipper. Third is Burger King flipper” (ibid., pp. xx–xxi). As he more succinctly and depressingly concludes, “the Combine needs dumb adults, and so it ensures the supply by making the kids dumb” (ibid., p. xxv). By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept. ([Location 2950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=2950)) - Note: And most Walmart employees need food subsidies to survive - As recent commentators have noted, there seems to have been an essentially “religious” (Urizenic) aspect to the emergence of financial systems and the imprimatur of coinage in these cultures (for example, witnessed at the Temple of Juno Moneta, from whence we get our word “money”); ([Location 3022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=3022)) - As Renfrew pertinently concludes: “many of the features of the modern city of the twenty-first century are already to be found in microcosm in the first cities of Sumer or of Mesoamerica. And the compelling belief systems of our own era find their predecessors in those of Karnac or of Teotihuacán. The societies of prehistoric times are the foundation upon which modern states and economies rest” (Renfrew, 2007, p. 218). ([Location 3052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=3052)) - It is perhaps a salient feature of many post-Babylonian societies that their leaders have tended to be drawn from the military. In Grossman’s evocative but precise phrase, those who are good at killing “have hacked their way to power” ([Location 3087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=3087)) - As McGilchrist’s research suggests, the pursuit and maintenance of power is, and always has been, the agenda and character of the left hemisphere. The media and entertainment industries, like every other rational and rationalised industry, participate in this power. And as the brain becomes increasingly dissociated and severed from its empathic and imaginative contexts, it becomes increasingly violent and abusive in its participation in and attraction towards power. Contemporary depictions of violence within the media are ubiquitous and astonishing: as Grossman notes, “these movies prepare our society for the acceptance of a truly hideous and sociopathic brand of role model” ([Location 3578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=3578)) - Once these connections are established—that humans are deserving of punishment, that the debasing and dehumanising of humans is fun, that sociopath forms of behaviour are normalised and attractive—then an almost total Urizenic formation of the psyche occurs. This form is what Blake refers to as the “Red Dragon”. ([Location 3592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=3592)) - The cognitive separation of subject and object, rationalising and imagining, produces in the left hemisphere an abstract, alien, pure, and eventually imposing and authoritarian “God” on the one hand, and “Nature” on the other: a godless, natural, essentially rational, world obeying it. ([Location 4143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4143)) - Individuals with autism and AS have an absolute need for order: and hence for rules, laws, regulations. This fascination with numbers, machines, and ordering is clearly also part of the basic impulse behind science; and it can also manifest itself as an obsessive interest in train timetables, mathematics, and binary systems—systems “where things were either true or false”. ([Location 4167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4167)) - This rather autistic or “zero empathy” interest in and need for laws and codes, Baron-Cohen notes, is also manifest in a perhaps surprising obsession with specifically moral codes. He observes in many autistic people not an absence of morality, but rather the emergence of “superdeveloped moral codes in people with autism, being intolerant of those who bend the rules” ([Location 4177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4177)) - An utterly disconnected, divided Reason—“pure” Reason if you like—would not be a precision instrument, let alone a luminous Angel, but a ravenous, compulsive program, endlessly driven to dissect, devour, manipulate, and use. ([Location 4266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4266)) - Jesus was, for Blake, perhaps the most forceful and vivid instantiation of this sense of total free imagination, of right-hemispheric interrelatedness and transcendence, one based upon the recognition of the need to forgive each other (the only alternative being “to accuse”, the literal meaning of the Hebrew word “Satan”, or diábolos in Greek). But to forgive another requires letting go of the ego, and many people understandably find this hard to do as it goes against all the Urizenic programming. ([Location 4326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4326)) - The left brain only sees the world in terms of mutual use and consumption (classical Darwinism), but in fact a far greater and much deeper exchange is constantly taking place: the constant sacrifice of Being in order for the individual to live, and the constant sacrifice of the Individual in order that divinity and awareness is brought into this world. ([Location 4334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSQSNLS&location=4334))