Iain McGilchrist on Tradition – Jan Höglund's Blog

Iain McGilchrist mentions human rights twice in The Matter with Things. The following quote is from one of those places (my emphasis in bold):

”Jürgen Habermas sees Christianity playing a tacit role in modern society […] He, like many others, views our contemporary allegiance to freedom of life, social solidarity, emancipation, individual morality of conscience, justice, and human rights as directly derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The fact that our civilisation has not yet completely fallen apart is a demonstration not that the tradition can be dispensed with, but that it continues, for a while, to be rooted in our psyche. Of its legacy, he says, ‘to this day, there is no alternative to it. […]’ We are enjoying the afterglow of a fire we are doing our best to extinguish: when it goes out it cannot be rekindled within our lifetime.”¹

Philippe Portier identifies three phases in Habermas’s attitude towards religion:

”[T]he first, in the decade of 1980, when the younger Jürgen, in the spirit of Marx, argued against religion seeing it as an “alienating reality” and “control tool”; the second phase, from the mid-1980s to the beginning of the 21st Century, when he stopped discussing it and, as a secular commentator, relegated it to matters of private life; and the third, from then until now, when Habermas saw a positive social role of religion.”²

It is perhaps not so surprising that you gravitate towards religion and tradition as you get older? It is also perhaps not so surprising that traditionalists are enchanted by McGilchrist?³ To be fair, McGilchrist understands “only too well why conventional religion is hard to accept for many people“.⁴ But it’s one thing to learn from a tradition, quite another to see no alternative to it. Precisely because “cultures are living“,⁵ it is only natural that traditions die?

Footnotes:
1. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 1991.
2. Wikipedia, Jürgen Habermas. Last modified 20231209. Accessed 20231212. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jürgen_Habermas
3. Rod Dreher, “The Enchantments of Iain McGilchrist“, The European Conservative, 20230808. Accessed 20231212. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/the-enchantments-of-iain-mcghilchrist/
4. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 1992.
5. Ibid., p. 1993. I agree with McGilchrist that cultures are living, but put a different slant on it.