McGilchrist’s thesis is that, whilst both hemispheres and ways of approaching the world are vital, the left hemisphere with its narrow focus and fragmented, mechanistic understanding of reality – the Emissary – is naturally subservient to the integrated big picture understanding of the right hemisphere – the Master.
However, he believes that, in recent centuries and increasingly since World War II, the left hemisphere’s way of understanding the world has increasingly predominated, especially in the West.
This is partly because humanity has been seduced by the left hemisphere’s power to manipulate the world around us; partly because of the simplicity and neatness of the answers it offers, even if they’re wrong; and partly because of its reflexive relationship with the Machine and its need to deal with mechanistic models of reality.26
“As machine intelligence saturates the world around us, the way the world behaves will change, unpredictably.”
You don’t have to subscribe to McGilchrist’s wider historical thesis to see how an inflexible privileging of theory and models over reality can have disastrous consequences: the central bank models of inflation which failed; the financial models which said that certain events could only happen once every few million years – but actually occur every few years; political ideologies that demand reality conform to abstract dogmas; myopic focus on narrow issues with total failure to consider wider fallout (covid-related lockdowns with their inevitable long tail); the idea that modernity marks a radical break with the past and we are somehow free of human nature and the tides of history. The list goes on.
It is hard not to see the imprimatur of the left hemisphere in this, the upstart Emissary usurping the reflective Master.
The left hemisphere’s traits have been instrumental in building the Machine, granting us an increasing ability to manipulate the world. This has brought phenomenal positive advances, from medicine to nutrition, travel and communication.
But the Machine also reinforces the left hemisphere’s bias towards a simplistic, mechanistic view of reality, a predisposition to the known, certainty and control. And an unwillingness to recalibrate in the face of new evidence – or even outright denial that such evidence exists.
These habits have been hyper-charged by the atypical economic stability of the last few decades, which fed technocratic illusions of control and a belief that all we need is more data and more control and everything will be all right.
Which makes the shock of the real even greater.
OUT OF CONTROL
As Russia retreated from Kherson in late 2022, it took with it the bones of that city’s founder, Grigory Potemkin, unintentionally symbolising the retreat of magical thinking.27
After a year which humbled pretentions in all dimensions, the near-term outlook remains highly uncertain, but longer-term contours seem clearer.
The Great Moderation is over. Disinflationary forces are not dead – it’s inflation volatility for a reason – but they are in a staggered retreat. We have crossed the Rubicon into a new, more inflation-prone and volatile era courtesy of generational shifts in world order, demography, fiscal and monetary policy, central banking and environmental risk. But the Zeitenwende is especially risky because of the paradoxical influence of the Machine.
Recalling the way the Great Powers failed to understand how technology had raised the stakes before World War I, Henry Kissinger recently urged world leaders to “reflect on the impact on [the Ukraine War] and on long-term strategy of incipient high-technology and artificial intelligence.” Once computers become the principal executors of strategy, he continued, “the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input? How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities?”28
Kissinger’s challenge is not just a reminder that Ukraine War fallout could spring further surprises, or that technological change means future conflicts risk escalating in unexpected ways.
It’s a reminder that, as machine intelligence saturates everything around us, the way the world behaves will change, unpredictably. So the Machine and its artificial intelligence black boxes enhance our illusion of control whilst simultaneously injecting greater risk and uncertainty into an inherently unpredictable world. The model-busting moves will keep coming. And, with its addiction to models and theories married to a lack of historical literacy, finance is especially exposed.
26 Ibid 27 Hat tip to Richard Chartres! 28 Kissinger (17 Dec 22), The Spectator, How to avoid another world war