Barrel Strength

This is a photograph of a valley in Baffin Island. Please observe the U-shape of the valley. That space was formerly occupied by ice. This is the typical shape of a valley created by ice, in contrast to the V-shape of a valley created by water erosion.

Millions of tons of ice have melted to expose that fiord. So yes, this is the time scale on which to consider the reality of global warming. Thousands of years. Do you see the glacier hanging there in the background, high in the mountains? That is where the glacier has retreated. I say hurrah!

The warmists have a severe problem: how to climb down from their apocryphal predictions. It has to be done carefully. They are starting to realize, even inside the cult, that the world is not warming fast enough, and that the attempts to hide global warming inside deep ocean currents , as was suggested by a prominent warmist a couple of months ago, are failing to persuade. The faithful are slipping away.

They know they have to contend with the irregular recurrence of ice ages. They know, to the extent any science reaches them, that the earth is in an ice age, and we are in an interglacial period, shortly to come to an end.

The narrative has to be modulated. Ice ages. Global warming. How do they  reconcile the narratives?

Easy!

Global warming is delaying the onset of the next ice age! So says Dr. Luke Skinner of Cambridge University.

Says the Beeb Magazine:

“In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years – but emissions have been so high that it will not.

You are wondering: do I assume this is all centrally directed? By “this” I denote the studies and the media treatment of studies, more especially.

It amuses me to think that all this panic mongering is centrally directed,  no such assumption is necessary.

I think that the media’s treatment of man-caused global warming is like the case reported by Malcom Muggeridge, when he worked for the Guardian in the 1930s. He shouted down the hall to the senior editor “what’s our line on corporal punishment?”. The call came back “Same as capital punishment, only more so!”.

Something of the same nature is occurring in the media. First there is a Line on the issue. The Party Line. The party line exists easily even without the communist Party, because the tendency to leftism is eternal. Out with Marxism, in with Spaceship Earth and Global Warming.

Next, the Party Line has to change. Why? All the climate gate email hacks showed that the scientists (Trenberth, Briffa, Mann et al) were vicious little shits proclaiming anathema on their critics but seriously concerned they could not prove what they were insisting upon. Too much slowly accumulating evidence that AGW is either not happening, not happening fast enough, or that CO2 is not the cause of climate cycles.

Moving off the Party Line has to be done carefully, but it can be done boldly so long as the Party moves smartly and pretends it never thought any differently. In this case, CO2 is being blamed for slowing  the inevitable advent of the next ice age, as if this were a bad thing.

The loss in clarity of the narrative is apparent – that CO2 is not wholly bad – but the gain may be worth it. The clarity gained is to introduce to the faithful that ice ages occur. The science has to be fed to them bit by bit, lest they freak out when they realize how badly they have been conned.

Thus it is imperative when enough people at cocktail parties start to talk about ice ages and Milankovich cycles, and the warmist  faithful are being assaulted by too many well-informed skeptics telling them they are full of shit, then they must be informed of just enough science to make them comfortable again. CO2 bad! Bad humans! Bad! Gaia is angry!

I am not sure whether the Line is centrally directed, or whether it behaves as if it is. Your thoughts would be welcomed.

Former State Senator and Republican Cook County Board President candidate Roger Keats and his wife Tina are leaving Illinois to live in Texas . They bid farewell to their Illinois friends in a Wilmette Beacon article and with this letter this weekend, saying they’re “voting with their feet and their wallets”:

GOOD BYE AND GOOD LUCK

As we leave Illinois for good, I wanted to say goodbye to my friends and wish all of you well. I am a lifelong son of the heartland and proud of it. After 60 years, I leave Illinois with a heavy heart. BUT enough is enough! The leaders of Illinois refuse to see we can’t continue going in the direction we are and expect people who have options to stay here. I remember when Illinois had 25 congressmen. In 2012 we will have 18. Compared to the rest of the country we have lost 1/4th of our population. Don’t blame the weather, because I love 4 seasons.

Illinois just sold still more bonds and our credit rating is so bad we pay higher interest rates than junk bonds! Junk Bonds! Illinois is ranked 50th for fiscal policy; 47th in job creation; 1st in unfunded pension liabilities; 2nd largest budget deficit; 1st in failing schools; 1st in bonded indebtedness; highest sales tax in the nation; most judges indicted (Operations Grilled and Gambat); and 5 of our last 9 elected governors have been indicted. That is more than the other 49 states added together! Then add 32 Chicago Aldermen and (according to the Chicago Tribune) over 1000 state and municipal employees indicted. The corruption tax is a real cost of doing business. We are the butt of jokes for stand up comics.

We live in the most corrupt big city, in the most corrupt big county in the most corrupt state in America .. I am sick and tired of subsidizing crooks. A day rarely passes without an article about the corruption and incompetence. Chicago even got caught rigging the tests to hire police and fire! Our Crook County CORPORATE property tax system is intentionally corrupt. The Democrat State Chairman who is also the Speaker of the Illinois House (Spkr. Mike Madigan) and the most senior alderman in Chicago each make well over a million dollars a year putting the fix in for their clients tax assessments.

We are moving to Texas where there is no income tax while Illinois just went up 67%. Texas sales tax is ½ of ours, which is the highest in the nation. Southern states are supportive of job producers, tax payers and folks who offer opportunities to their residents. Illinois shakes them down for every penny that can be extorted from them.

In the Hill Country of Texas (near Austin and San Antonio ) we bought a gracious home on almost 2 acres with a swimming pool. It is new, will cost us around 40% of what our home in Wilmette just sold for and the property taxes are 1/3rd of what they are here. Cook County ‘ s property tax system is a disaster: Wilmette homes near ours sell for 50% more and their property taxes are ½ of ours. Our assessed home value was 50% higher than the sales price. The system is unfair and incompetent.

Our home value is down 40%, our property taxes are up 20% and our local schools have still another referendum on the ballot to increase taxes over 20% in one year. I could go on, but enough is enough. I feel as if we are standing on the deck of the Titanic and I can see the icebergs right in front of us. I will miss our friends a great deal. I have called Illinois home for essentially my entire life. But it is time to go where there is honest, competent and cost effective government.

We have chosen to vote with our feet and our wallets. My best to all of you and good luck!

One of the major culprits behind the 2008 financial crisis was the subprime lending which was enforced via the Community Reinvestment Act. Now the lessons from that crisis are being ignored in favour of Obama’s political agenda as the same practises are enforced.

Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of
America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine
on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending
practices.

Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in
2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities
from 2004 to 2008.

Negative comments on this Ryerson Journalism Review article running nine to two in favour of 416 hipsters catching a clue.  The election is over. We won. You lost. And a hard rain is gonna fall.

You should read this. It is called “How Doctors Die”, and they do not generally die like you and I would.

I remember as a young man I asked my father whether they ever turned off the taps on a dying patient. “All the time” was his reply.

Like a car in its last year of life, the expenditure curve goes sharply upward as your brakes, alternator, steering, transmission and finaly your engine fails. You will go through several cars in your life, and you can see a pattern emerge. You can prepare for the termination of your relationship to your car. You cannot do this in relation to your parents. Generally we have only two of them, two data points, and it is difficult to realize they will die, and so will we. So please, no heroic measures.

I once read of a doctor who said there was “no use dying with money in your pocket”, meaning that medecine should be resorted to in all situations. Nothing could be further from the truth; his was just the ideology of a salesman.

The more sensible point of view, from Ken Murray, author of “How Doctors Die”, is this:

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

1. Stay out of hospitals
2. Exercize and have sex frequently
3. Enjoy your life
4. Be socially embedded
5. Prepare to die

6. Die at home

The Internet is for porn. Or as one Dutch-Canadian communications theorist once said, the goal of all technological progress in communications is to allow people to send each other pictures of themselves fucking. The goal has been achieved. Between a photograph labelling system that uniquely identifes each photograph on the net, and easily assembled tumblr websites, there has beeen a proliferation of porn sites, each one more or less assiduously maintained by some porn fanatic. Their number is legion, and growing.

Extensive research into these sites reveals that there are a lot of women out there doing naughty things in front of their husbands or boyfriends, with his cock, with his friend’s cocks, with casual acquaintances, with girflriends, on beaches, in bedrooms, in cars, in parking lots, at swimming pools, nearly everywhere. And as for the men doing things with other men, don’t get me started. Their shamelessness is not less than the women’s and possibly greater.

There are sites for or about amateurs, gays, professional porn stars, trannies, big tit afficionados, teens, older women, bondage and discipline, male domination, female domination, cuckolds (fucking groups of black men while being photographed by the hubby seems to be a large niche), anal, public, nude beach, lesbian, facials, you name it.

All the photos appear to be in the public domain. I am waiting for the first female politician to run successfully for office despite a picture of her with her mouth stuffed with her former boyfriend’s dick. I expect this within the decade. So the Minister of Transportation (say) sucks dick? Meh. If an associate deputy minister of the department of redundancy disports herself on a nude beach, will anyne care?

I think of the hours of work each day that are required to maintain and update these sites. Perhaps I am wrong and the classification system allows for the more rapid recognition of photos consistent with the site’s themes. Surely however, a great deal of labour is poured into these sites for months and years on end. Whoever has maintained a blog knows how often that particular dog has to be walked.

More serious research should be conducted on the sex-habits of North Americans with porn sites as a proxy for actual behaviour. The big issue would be the discount to be applied to assess how representative the sites and the acts depicted are of actual behaviour. I read once that the average North American male has had seven sex partners in life, while the female has had five. Don’t ask me how they derived such figures. If we grant that this behaviour is distributed on a bell curve, then the top five percent of sex practitioners must have way more sexual activity than the norm. Or, as I think more likely, it is a power curve, then a very few people are the Amazons, googles, and hotmails of this world, and a long tail goes out to zero.

Is the inequality of sexual partners and activities increasing with increases of inequality of wealth?

In any case, there are issues of human behaviour worth investigating here. I suspect that, armed with some empirical data, and some skepticism about current ideas of who is doing what to whom, we might come to a better understanding of human nature in prosperous times. How many more bathtubs do we actually need than we have now? Zero to one, maybe. How many more sex partners, orgies, threesomes or kinky sex would you like to have than you have now? You get my point. Social scientists, stop your blathering about empowerment, racialized, otherness, queering, and do some empirical research. Tumblrworld awaits your intrepid explorations. But before you theorize, consult a mathematician for your models.

CBC Radio One: A day’s listening:

Victims: which groups the CBC will cover in a given day in 2011

plight of the gays in the US military, the plight of gays generally, Canadian aboriginals, women generally, Arab protesters, as long as they are against tyrants, but not if they burn Christian churches

Icons: people you will hear from or about regularly

Jane Fonda, feminists generally, the Arab spring, Noam Chomsly, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, social activists, and protesters against capitalism, global warming, or income inequality

Issues: what concerns the CBC and its presumed listenership

The Occupy movement, income inequalities, capitalism, anthropogenic global warming, Conservative lack of compassion

What you do not hear about on CBC:

Victims: Christians in Islamic lands, men abused by women, the average taxpayer, people not employed because of anti-pipeline or anti-forestry movements

People you do not hear from or about on CBC

Icons: Warren Buffett, Conrad Black, George Jonas, David Warren, Mark Steyn, David Frum, and  a very long list of moderates, liberals, and people who think

Issues: issues not discussed by anyone on CBC

Impending collapse of the Eurozone, state bankruptcies from decades of chronic overspending, the implications of the unequal distribution of intelligence in the population generally and between ethnic groups,  biological differences generally, anything that contradicts alarm about global warming.

You can add you own topics that will not be covered, people who will not be heard, ideas that will not be discussed. I welcome your contributions. I am merely scratching the surface.

Also, remember that it is not really state radio because the CBC does not answer effectively either to the government or to the regulator. Nor does it answer to the market. It is public radio, a great whale cruising the ocean of taxpayer money, magnificent, unaccountable, inscrutable, self-directed, self-involved, self-absorbed, and rapidly heading for Captain Stephen Harper and the good ship Tory, armed with sonar and a whale-gun. Flensing cannot be long off. Ambergris, anyone?

Last night, Christmas Eve, is one of the most significant occasions in our faith. My wife and I walked to the nearest Anglican Church. Picture the scene: a lovely wood-panelled modernist church, with a well-trained choir and  a good organist. So far so good, but 70 people in a place that could have held 150 without difficulty. Uh oh…and soon the reason became apparent: a complete dolt for a clergyman. He gave a sermon replete with references to the Grinch, Snoopy and the Red Baron, and told us to go out there and love one another like the coach saying go out there and win one for the Gipper.

This was called a “traditional Anglican service”. Our rector was using one of the newer services from the Book of Alternative Services, the kind for which the responses are in tunes no one yet knows how to sing. It was so banal, so suburban, so second rate I felt I had dropped through the floor into a mixed-sex scout pack in the basement.

I thought to myself, a few minutes of research on the Internet would result in any number of magnificent sermons on the incarnation.

Google “sermons on the birth of Christ”. If too many Baptist sermons appear, google “Anglican sermons on the birth of Christ”. Or try “sermons on the incarnation”.

Here is one:

If I had heard something like this…..

The first thing we must always remember, my dear friends, is this: He became man because God the Father loved the world. We must never tone down the love of God. We certainly live today in a very wicked world. We live today in a lawless and godless world – all of that is true. You and I both believe it is so and we weep over the fact. Let us remember, however, that this is the world that ‘God so loved’ and to which ‘He gave His Son’ (John 3, 16). O, what a strange and wonderful miracle! No other miracle faintly resembles this miracle: that the Son of God, being eternally divine, should take to Himself our nature – and it was done in love. We owe it to sinners round about us to love them though they stone us to death for telling them the truth. We owe it to sinners to witness to them and to tell them of the love of God. The elect will hear it even though the rest will be hardened.

….I would have thought my money well spent.

The Anglican Church, I sigh for it.

Another piece of wondferful news. Charlotte Gray, thinks the GG is “The government’s secret weapon for restoring the power of the monarchy”. Or so she says in the Walrus, the refuge of the Liberal intelligentsia.

After I wiped the snot from my upper lip from reading that, I began to think: “Maybe this is the secret Harper plan we have all been waiting for”.

Says Charlotte:

In an extraordinary return to the Canada of yesteryear, the government is engineering a comeback for the monarchy. Johnston, consciously or not, has been recruited into the prime minister’s campaign to restore the symbols of an older, whiter Canada.

The article then follows with a history of the role of Governor General, and a quick tour of Johnson’s career  – law professor and university president – where Johnson proved successful in rising to the top of the greasiest poles, and raising five highly accomplished daughters. I do not know which accomplishment is more difficult, but he did both.

And now back to Charlotte’s political analysis.

This quiet relaunch of the monarchy forms part of a larger campaign, led by a group of fierce monarchists, including Harper’s principal secretary, Ray Novak; John Baird; and Chris Champion, senior adviser to immigration minister Jason Kenney. These men make no secret of their eagerness to erase the Liberal-dominated narrative of recent Canadian history, with its emphasis on the Charter, multiculturalism, and the flag, and replace it with other, older traditions that embrace military victories and historical identification with Britain. Canadian achievements of the past half century are being expunged: the word “peacekeeping,” the concept for which Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson won the Nobel Prize, is rarely mentioned in Ottawa; and Baird has even redesigned his business card so it no longer features the flag or the name of his department’s headquarters, the Lester B. Pearson Building.

The Tories’ determination to remake Canada to suit their own tastes may come as no surprise, given their virulent aversion for all things Liberal. Nevertheless, it is an odd campaign to pursue in a country where most citizens are not of British origin, and where the idea of Canada as a “warrior nation” can rankle immigrants who have fled wars. The renewed spotlight on the Queen particularly irritates some Quebecers. “Has the Harper government decided to make francophone citizens feel like strangers in their own country?” asks Lysiane Gagnon, Quebec columnist for the Globe and Mail.

So I phoned the PMO and got my old buddy Steve on the phone.

Me: “Prime Minister, is it your intention to restore the Canada of 1965? You know, the low tax, pre-medicare, sound public finances, pre-official bilingualism place it once was? You know, the place with the aircraft carrier and the large air force?”

PM: “Doubtless in the fullness of time you will come to appreciate the amplitude of the conservative take-back of the country, but for now I can say: ‘Just watch me’ “.

Me: “Have you decided to make French Canadians feel like strangers in their own country?”

PM: “They have their country, we have ours. If they want to join Canada, they’re welcome, same as every qualified immigrant.”

Me: “Thank you very much Prime Minister. So is Charlotte Gray right?”

PM: “Who is Charlotte Gray?”

Thus ended the conversation. I swear the Prime Minister will take phone calls from anonymous Tory bloggers, if you ask sweetly enough.

So I have to credit Charlotte Gray for this scoop on the government’s intentions to return us to the whiter Canada of yore, where a protestant male can hope to aspire to the highest position in the land. It gives hope to the rest of us, that we too may aspire to the nation’s highest offices, even if we suffer from melanin and estrogen deficiency. A dark plot indeed, Charlotte.

David Frum said it best. Hitchens was a man who moved away from the moral certainty of Marxism to embrace a broader possibility of doubt and actual inquiry into the nature of the world, which requires that one reject “the smelly little orthodoxies” that Orwell described. I regret that  he did not end up a Christian, but, like Orwell, he stands as a permanent reproach to the political Left because he did not embrace the transcendent. Had he become a believer they could have dismissed him from further thought. But because he shared so many of their assumptions about the good life, his continuing attacks from that point of view could not be dismissed.  He confined the targets of his attacks to those things that ought to motivate the political Left, such as Islamofascism, but which do not, as we all observe.

He offended all the right people, and delighted in all the right things: literature, whiskey, smoking, conversation, inquiry and generally carrying on. If the political Left offered more Hitchens and fewer Noam Chomskys, I might be better able to take it seriously. Fortunately it does not.

I am persuaded that Hitchens has already encountered a huge surprise since dying, but I cannot know that with any part of my brain that can speak or write. I can only believe that. Let us hope that it is so, but in either case, I salute you, Christopher.

The Vicar of the Glebe, the Venerable Archdeacon Jeffrey Simpson, has discovered that Canadians believe least in the man-made origins of global warming:

According to a recent international poll, Canada has the highest number of citizens (22 per cent) of any economically advanced country who deny that human activity causes global warming. We can fairly presume the vast majority of this 22 per cent are in what we might loosely call the conservative world in Canada. They read the anti-global-warming newspapers and commentators, and they rely on the handful of academics who debunk global warming.

If, despite the billions that governments have invested in the global warming scare, and the relentless stream of warmist propaganda, Canadians are least persuaded, perhaps it has something to do with the five months a year in which they have to heat their houses and put on hats, gloves, coats, and sweaters, just to go outside and scrape ice or snow of the windshield.

10,000 years ago this place had the same climate as Baffin Island, and 10,000 years from now it will have returned to that state, unless AGW is real and effective. Let us hope so, but if I am right, all the heating of the world by man that has occurred in the past 150 years will avail naught. Our descendants will be living in Tennessee, and over-wintering in southern Mexico.

Anthropogenic global warming will soon join phlogiston in the scrap heap of ludicrous ideas.

From time to time I enjoy reading blogs of guys who make me look like the tolerant liberal that I am. After all, a lot of what passes for conservatism is not really conservative in a deep sense; rather it is the cry for a return to common sense, and in doing so, we must reject the cultural Bolshevism and nihilism of the past  60 years. So that makes Barrelstrengthians look like dyed in the wool conservatives, because we oppose submission to Islam, affirmative action,  or anthropogenic global warming, whereas what we really are is sensible people who favour free trade, religious freedom, including especially the right to avow one’s faith in God and the Christian faith in a public place, individual responsibilty, lawful behaviour, and well-brought up children. The rest is discussable.

For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.

For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)

To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.

So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.

• Throne and Altar
• Stuff Black People Don’t Like
• View from the Right
• Steve Sailer 

Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.

• Steynonline
• Jihad Watch
• Vlad Tepes

In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.

I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?

I can think of no book in recent times that has informed me more than Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary.

McGilchrist is a British physician, scientist and philosopher. The Master and his Emissary is, first, an explanation in terms of scientific research of how the two hemispheres of the human brain know the world, and second, a discussion of the unique characteristics of the Western world in terms of increasing left-hemisphere dominance.

This is not one of those trivial left-brain right-brain books that stimulates party-time conversation; it is a far-reaching, humane, and profound exploration of some issues that are swept under the rug in most contemporary discourse.

McGilchrist is at pains to educate the reader as to the latest scientific findings on how the two hemispheres differ in their appreciation of the world, and how they collaborate to allow us to be fully human.

Our basic problem is appreciating the right hemisphere’s role is that the left hemisphere controls the narrative. It is the talker, the story teller, the glib confident salesman making the pitch. In essence, McGilchrist shows (because the research shows) that the left hemisphere does not know what it is talking about, that the intuitive, accepting, permitting, imitative, comprehending part of the brain is the right hemisphere, which comprehends things totally but which does not control the flow of talk.

McGilchrist is carrying the offensive to the neuroscientists who have denigrated the functions of the right hemisphere, which they have likened to the zombie. Not so, says McGilchrist, it is the left hemnisphere which acts like a zombie when detached from the intuitive wisdom of the right. Zombies are the personification of those whose  right hemisphere functions have been shut down, and he says it is no accident that the idea of the zombie, the Frankenstein, emerges with the Enlightenment, with its singular emphasis on left-brained ways of knowing the world.

Today all the sources on intuitive life – cultural tradition, the natural world, the body, religion and art-  have been so conceptualized, devitalized and “deconstructed” (ironized) by the world of words, mechanistic systems and theories constituted by the left hemisphere that there powers to help us see beyond the hermetic world that it has set up have been largely drained from them.

Notions of excessive left-hemisphere dominance have received popular expression in movies like The Matrix. The resonance of this movie was generated by the feeling that the world is not as it appears to be – to the right hemisphere says McGilchrist.  The irruption of the right hemisphere into left-hemispheric consciousness is expressed by metaphors – such as by taking the blue pill. That is the only way to get around the censorship of the left hemisphere.

Other cultures, including our own in previous times, enjoyed a more relaxed relationship of the two hemispheres, so that symbolic communication between the hemispheres was not felt to threaten the analytic world view of the left.

I shall give you a flavour of the book’s power by the casual savaging McGilchrist gives to Richard Dawkins of the selfish meme fame.

A meme is said to be the replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits to another mind….ultimately and inevitably, including hte idea of God – the Dawkins delusion.This is a perfect example, incidentally, of the left hemisphere’s way of constructing its own history, not least in its way of breaking a culture into atomistic fragments devoid of context, as though snippets of behaviour, feeling or thinking – of experience in other words – stuck together in large enough numbers, constitute the world in which we live.”

Another merit of the book is his relatively brief, insightful treatment of Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), one of the most fascinating books I have read. Jaynes said that the voices of the gods or God heard by all the characters of Homer and the earlier parts of the Bible, as well as the sacred literatures of other ancient faiths, were actually heard by them; they were not metaphors but communications between the brain’s hemispheres.

“His insight that there was a connection between the voices of the gods and changes in the mental world of those who heard them, that this might have something to do with the brain, and indeed that it concerned relations between the hemispheres, remains, in my view, fundamentally correct. However, I believe he got one aspect of the story back to front. His contention that the phenomena he decribes came about because of the breakdown of the bicameral mind – so that the two hemispheres previously separate, now merged  – is the precise inverse of what happened. The phenomena came about because of a relative separation of the two chambers, the two hemispheres. Phenomna that wrere previously uncomplicatedly experienced as a part of a relatively unified consciousness now became alien.” 

What is the take-away from McGilchrist’s book? The import of  the book is that the western world is in a mental crisis caused by the over-dependence on left-hemisphere ways of knowing the world, and the delegitimization of religion, culture, intuitions, and other ways in which the silent right-hemisphere tries to rein in the left hemisphere and inform it of who it is really working for.

Do you recall the first Tron movie? The plot concerned “programs” inside computers fighting against the usurper who claimed that there are no users who dwelt outside the apparently self-sufficient world of the computer, that the programs worked only for the Master Program. You can interpret this tale as a metaphor that God exists outside the world, and that we programs are working for him. But McGilchrist invites you to consider that Tron can just as well be considered to be an intuition that the usurper is the left brain asserting that there is no right hemisphere.

Tron, the Matrix, and the Master and his Emissary: they are all on the same theme. McGilchrist expounds  the neuroscience and philosophy which justify the insights of popular culture.