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4 4 July 2016
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CULTURE
W
e live in an age of ephemera and digital
myopia that befuddle our wits and have
thrown up the possibility of a Trump
Presidency. Britain departs the Euro
-
pean, stage right, after a campaign
marred by cynicism and misinformation. The Siren
sounds of advertising impel us to consume beyond
what we need and corporations and their despots exer-
cise unaccountable power over vast, and growing,
fortunes. In an effort to understand this cultural drift I
turn to philosophy, evolution and the effect of changes
in technology, for answers.
In philosophy I attempt to harmonise two seemingly
contradictory notions that inform my understanding.
The first is a notion expressed by the early Greek phi-
losopher Heraclitus (d 475 BCE) that “no man ever steps
into the same river twice, for he’s not the same man and
the river is not the same”. This phe-
nomenological view rests on
observation of a constantly evolving
reality. It is a process similar to the
gathering of scientific data.
The second approach is ideological
but might be seen as analogous to
over-arching scientific laws. This is
the idea of prior knowledge, an objec-
tive belief in identifiable forms of
justice or beauty. In Western philoso-
phy this is identified with Plato (d 347
BCE) and his successors who trained
their ears to the strains of an elusive
harmony.
Inferring truth solely from observa-
tion of phenomena is problematic,
especially where life is reduced to competition between
individual genes for expression as expounded by Rich-
ard Dawkins in his formative, 'The Selfish Gene' (1976).
These competing ideas may be resolved by allowing
for an evolving objectivity: a fleeting truth. That is to
say that answers to questions posed in Ancient Greece
are quite distinct from those we seek today. It is dan-
gerous talk, no doubt, to assume that humans have a
capacity to discern principles arising from observation
of a shifting reality, but without that assumption there
is little hope for us.
We can reject that idea and see homo sapiens as no
more than a primate with a powerful brain that has suc-
cessfully stored knowledge over millennia, beginning
with farming and proceeding through literacy into the
Internet. But then there is a temptation to retreat into
relativist angst and dismiss our thoughts as idle.
Most political ideologies, Marxism not least, eschew
nihilism and posit a Utopia that we should drive
towards, the best acknowledging the word’s origins in
Greek as ‘no place’, but an aspiration. For example Vil-
lage magazine promotes equality and sustainability as
substantial ideals necessarily shifting with the flow of
events.
Agreeing on principles is a treacherous business, not
least in crooked Ireland. It requires serious engagement
over time with a great range of information and disci-
plines. Moreover, we must also leave a space for
mystery as most Ancient Greek philosophers assuredly
did.
It was in that Greece of Antiquity that it seems that
ideal and reality – form and content – came into closest
balance. Fifth-century Athens was not human perfec-
tion incarnate: slavery was commonplace and women
were not seen as equal to men, but still their achieve-
ments are unparallelled in a host of domains, including
architecture, where an accommodation with Nature
appears to have been reached.
In his 'History of Western Philosophy' (1945), Ber-
trand Russell wrote that: “nothing is so surprising or so
difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilisation
in Greece … What they achieved in art and literature is
familiar to everybody, but what they achieved in the
purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional”.
How to comprehend the virtually simultaneous arrival
of science, history and mathematics, the very
Birdbrain
Heraclitus and Plato, evolving
objectivity and the moronic internet
by Frank Armstrong
Nothing is so surprising
or so difficult to account
for as the sudden rise of
civilisation in Greece…
What they achieved in
art and literature and
especially in the purely
intellectual realm
July 2016 4 5
fundaments of a dominant Western
civilisation?
The psychiatrist and literary
scholar, Iain McGilchrist, in his 'The
Master and his Emissary' (2009),
proposes that a steep evolution
occurred in Ancient Greece when an
abrupt collective separation in
function between the two hemi
-
spheres of the brain – broadly a
creative right and rational left
– occurred.
To begin with the hemispheres
achieved a beatific balance. But he argues that, since
our Hellenic heights, left-brained rationality has
emerged dominant over the creative right hemisphere.
Thus we have developed extraordinary technologies
but failed to use them wisely, bringing us to the brink
of auto-destruction, a process that continues apace in
the age of the Internet.
McGilchrist writes that: “The Greeks began the pro-
cess of standing back; and the beginnings of analytical
philosophy, of theorising about the political state, of
the development of maps, of the observation of the
stars and the ‘objective’ natural world, all may be medi-
ated by the left hemisphere; though the urge to do it at
all comes from the right”. He also sees the origins of
the individual “as distinct from, as well as bonded to,
the community”.
He wrote of this evolution in our minds: “My thesis is
that the separation of the hemispheres brought with it
both advantages and disadvantages. It made possible
a standing outside of the ‘natural’ frame of reference,
the common-sense everyday way in which we see the
world. In doing so it enabled us to build up that ‘neces-
sary distance’ from the world and from ourselves,
achieved originally by the frontal lobes, and gave us
insight into things that otherwise we could not have
seen, even making it possible for us to form deeper
empathic connections with one another and with the
world at large. The best example of this is the fascinat-
ing rise of drama in the Greek world, in which the
thoughts and feelings of ourselves and of others are
apparently objectified, and yet returned as our own. A
special sort of seeing arises, in which both distance and
empathy are crucial”.
However: “Separation also sowed the seeds of left-
hemisphere isolationism … At this stage in cultural
history, the two hemispheres were still working largely
together, and so the benefits outweighed by a long way
the disadvantages, but the disadvantages became
more apparent over time”.
A technological development that McGilchrist asso-
ciates with the shift was the emergence of money
currencies, reigning ascendant by the fourth century
BCE. This replaced the reciprocal exchange of gifts
which are “not precise, not calculated, not instantane-
ously enacted or automatically received, not required;
the gifts are not themselves substitutable, but unique;
and the emphasis is on the value of creating or main-
taining a relationship, which is also unique”. Money
creates a distance between people that has been grow-
ing ever since, especially with the sophistication of
modern usury.
McGilchrist argues that metaphor, imagination and
reason rather than a remote rationality, which he iden-
tifies with René Descartes (d 1650) in particular, should
inform our understanding of the world in a powerful
thesis that combines scientific insight with acute analy-
sis of the history of Western thought. In my view it only
comes a cropper when he advocates preserving ves-
tiges of monarchy over republican government.
Assuming the descendants of a warrior caste are suited
to being heads of states, symbolically or otherwise,
seems abhorrent to reason. However, as I will explore,
the democratic alternative is threatened by the decline
in concentration, in the era of the Internet; linked to a
decline in the reading of serious books.
While acknowledging Plato’s ideas as more poetic
than is often assumed, McGilchrist sets him in
The separation of the right
and left hemispheres in
Ancient Greece made
possible a standing outside
of the ‘natural’ frame of
reference, the common-
sense everyday
not the same
4 6 July 2016
opposition to the phe-
nomenological view
identified with Heraclitus.
But I propose that we need to
continue to strive for eternal
truths, however fleeting the encoun-
ters may be. Otherwise we drown.
Can Plato’s 'Republic' which divides mankind into
castes of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Copper be recovered
from racism and totalitarianism? The literary critic
Northrop Frye (d 1991) argued that the state he imagi-
nes should be treated allegorically and that the real
location of the 'Republic' is in the mind: “The wise
man’s mind is a ruthless dictatorship of reason over
appetite achieved by the control of will … the real Utopia
is an individual goal, of which the disciplined society is
an allegory”.
WB Yeats argued “that much of the confusion of
modern philosophy … comes from our renouncing the
ancient hierarchy of beings from man up to the One”.
In part this is based on Yeats’ idea of the revolt of soul
against intellect, accessing the creativity of our uncon-
scious thoughts which McGilchrist would identify with
right-hemisphere function. Out of this duality we might
shape a confrontation with the challenges of our time.
It is those who ascend a chain of both intellect and
imagination rather than the purely technocratic that
should chart our society’s course.
Yeats and other poets, beginning with William Blake,
have emphasised the vital force of imagination as a
guarantee of freedom in the scientific age.
Paradoxically we live in an age of increasing igno-
rance, when digital ephemera cloud deep awareness.
Most human beings blithely ignore warnings of impend-
ing doom and the horrendous loss of the natural world
and even threats to human survival. We’re in a muddle
that may originate in defective thinking. So much of
what we consume is unnecessary and vacuous. Adver-
tising charms us into mindless consumption. Appetite
dominates will.
Technology was supposed to free us from the con-
straints of work but the opposite has occurred as new
fetters crystallise. The sector concentrates vast finan-
cial resources in a few hands. It is left to chance whether
the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are suited
to shaping the future of humanity. Our liberties in this
plutocracy converge on those under the enlightened
despots of the eighteenth century in Europe: with pref-
erences and tastes guided as never before by cunning
algorithms.
Before the Internet the greatest breakthrough in com-
munication was Johannes Gutenberg’s development of
moveable type in about 1450 (for the first time in
Europe) which was a necessary precursor to the Renais-
sance, and perhaps to democracy. The Canadian critic
Northrop Frye identified the book, mass-produced
through printing presses, as the “by-product of the art
of writing, and the technological instrument that makes
democracy a working possibility – avoiding all rhetori-
cal tricks designed to induce hypnosis in an audience,
relying on nothing but the inner force and continuity of
the argument…Behind the book is the larger social con-
text of a body of written documents to which there is
public access, the guarantee of the fairness of that
internal debate on which democracy rests”.
The book he says “is not linear: we follow a line while
we are reading but the book itself is a stationary visual
focus of a community”. This he distinguishes from “the
electronic media that increase the amount of linear
experience, of things seen and heard that are quickly
forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superfi-
cial alertness combined with increased difficulty
preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief
characteristic of education”.
Frye wrote this in the 1970s, at a time when electronic
media meant the television. He would surely despair at
attention-spans today which see most media reduced
to pornographic click-bait and dull chatter about sport
and celebrities that are “quickly forgotten about”. The
crucial distinction between the e-book and the real
book is that the former does not provide a “stationary
visual focus”. The tangible book offers an ease of
access and permits non-linear reading. The Heraclitean
torrent of the Internet makes it difficult for us to fix on
the kinds of principles that books adumbrate.
Frye also identifies a rejection of history and tradi-
tion, an iconoclastic tendency to dismiss the past rather
than learn from it, especially in America: “A society with
a revolutionary basis, like American society, is often
inclined to be impatient of history and tradition. "His-
tory is bunk" said Henry Ford, at one end of the social
scale: "I don’t take no stock in dead people", said Huck-
We have developed
extraordinary technologies
but failed to use them wisely,
bringing us to the brink of
auto-destruction, in the age of
the Internet
CULTURE
July 2016 4 7
leberry Finn, at the other.
The future, in such a view, cannot be the out-
come of the past: it is a brand-new future, which
may be implicit in the present but is to be built
out of the materials of the present by an act of
will, which cannot operate until it has been
released from the past. The strongly negative
mood in today’s radicalism, the tendency to be
against rather than for, is consistent with this:
whatever is defined is hampering, and only the
undefined is free”.
Liberation from the grip of dominant, and
often illogical, orthodoxies is important, but
dismissing all that came before leaves us bereft
and drowning.
The revolutionary trend that dismisses his-
tory and even ideas of objective justice has its
origin in the Renaissance which James Joyce
wrote has:
“Placed the journalist in the monk’s chair: in
other words, it has deposed a sharp, limited
and formal mind in order to hand the sceptre to
a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging … a
mentality that is restless and somewhat
amorphous … Untiring creative power, heated,
strong passion, the intense desire to see and
feel, unfettered and prolix curiosity have, after
three centuries, degenerated into frenetic sen-
sationalism. Indeed one might say of modern
man that he has an epidermis rather than a
soul. The sensory power of his organism has
developed enormously, but it has developed to
the detriment of his spiritual faculty. We lack
moral sense and perhaps also strength of imag-
ination … we are avid for details. For this reason
our literary jargon speaks of nothing else than
local colour, atmosphere, atavism: whence the
restless search for what is new and strange, the
accumulation of details that have been
observed and read, the parading of the common
culture”.
But Joyce did identify one important redeem-
ing feature: “If the Renaissance did nothing
else, it did much in creating within ourselves
and our art a sense of pity for every being that
lives and hopes and dies and deludes itself. In
this at least we excel the ancients: in this the
popular journalist is greater than the
theologian”.
Here again we encounter a conflict between
the respective legacies of Plato and Heraclitus.
The Platonic ideal, dear to the medieval mind,
does not have the flexibility to observe the
stream, instead staring towards an a priori and
unchanging heavenly sphere. This was washed
away in the current of the Renaissance. But the
purely Heraclitean mind that has reached its
apotheosis with the Internet just goes with the
flow and shrugs its shoulders at the absurdity
of it all; emoticons substituting for words and
selfies for bildungsroman.
Analysing the origins of the mob that sup-
ports Trump is a precarious and depressing
exercise but loss of attention span is surely a
significant factor. The modern human is a bewil-
dered creature educated in the use of tools – an
infant can work a tablet – but increasingly
removed from sustained intellectual engage-
ment or poetic imagination: the province of
serious books and enquiring spirituality. Befud-
dled minds identify with shrill invective and
cheap humour: the sweeter harmonies of jus-
tice, beauty and truth go unheard, just as the
high pitch of the dogwhistle is inaccessible to
our ears.
Moreover, can we counter the complexity of
a financial system serving the interests of those
who rule over it? Can we ever enter an equilib-
rium with Nature?
Individual monetary wealth must be con-
tained within prescribed limits but an innovative
society can be served by incentives reliant on a
form of objective currency. We need those
incentives to develop alternatives to fossil fuels
and livestock, and because small businesses
harness creativity and the vibrancy of trade.
The money market is, however, clearly unsuited
to addressing contemporary deprivations of
basic needs manifest, for example, in home
-
lessness and food poverty. The challenge is to
reorder our priorities as educated individuals,
and reassert democratically-accountable states
over corporations. But as Frye indicates this
requires an electorate capable of intellectual
engagement derived from reading serious
books: more philosophers in other words.
A wise society can be realised by the reorien-
tation of educational priorities towards the
humanities, and its books, and away from an
unmediated approach to science, as the former
should guide the latter. The human should
guide the machine and not become victim to it,
as Dr Frankenstein succumbed to his monster.
Frye observed perceptively: “The civilisation
produced by the automobile, with its network
of highways, the blasted deserts of its parking
lots, the grid plan of cities, and the human sac-
rifices offered to it on every holiday, clearly
raises the question of who is enslaving whom”.
We need to reassert the creativity and origi-
nality of the right hemisphere to guide the
rationality of the left hemisphere as McGilchrist
proposes. The evolution he observed is not
irreversible.
In Greek mythology Prometheus is the fire-
bringer who provided human beings with the
power to control Nature and rise above it con-
trary to the wishes of Zeus who punishes him
for eternity. Humans have been slashing and
burning their way through primordial forests
since. It could eventually end in tragedy for us
as it has for many species, especially in this,
the Anthropocene, the era of human geological
time.
But another light shines too, that is the light
of human ideas. We are capable of employing
reason, even in the era of the Internet.
Frye identifies a rejection
of history and tradition,
an iconoclastic tendency
to dismiss the past
rather than learn from it,
especially in America
From around the time of Ancient Greece the functions have been separate
