Iain McGilchrist on Civilization and the Divided Mind

Author, scholar, and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist speaks with John Bell of The Conciliators Guild about human societies, past and present. They discuss how the quality of a civilization’s culture and ideas – its tendency to flourish or self-destruct – reflects its deeply-ingrained habits of thinking.

Iain McGilchrist, a medical doctor and former Oxford literary scholar, is the author of several landmark works about the impact of the brain hemispheres on human life and culture.

His best known are 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World', published in 2012, and his two-volume magnum opus 'The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World,' released in 2021.

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0:00:00 - Hubris
0:01:36 - Introduction
0:04:35 - Brain hemisphere differences
0:12:16 - The world of the left hemisphere
0:23:28 - The left hemisphere's war on life
0:30:02 - Bureaucratic totalitarianism
0:38:49 - Civilizations in balance
0:49:28 - Circularity and the coincidence of opposites
0:56:39 - The Enlightenment and the Romantics
1:05:20 - A return to the sacred
1:11:41 - Civilizational suicide
1:17:56 - Outro