Retrospective 2024-33

This is a retrospective of week 33, 2024 (2024-08-12–2024-08-18).

This week, I have read Min europiska familj: de senaste 54000 åren by Karin Bojs. The book is in Swedish and is about Bojs’ family for the past 54,000 years. The first part of the book is more interesting than the last part. The last part is more about Bojs’ personal family history over the past 300 years. (I’m not particularly interested in genealogy.)

The following quote caught my interest. It reminds me of the situation the world is in today. Karin Bojs describes how the Emissary (the left hemisphere of the brain) takes over from the Master (the right hemisphere) in a settlement in the southern part of Sweden. Karin Bojs writes (my translation from Swedish to English):

At the excavation site of Tågerup in Skåne, archaeologists have found layers that span a period beginning 8,500 years ago and ending only 1,700 years later. … During the earlier period…life was easier. There was no significant competition for nature’s resources. The population was small. They could easily find enough to eat, and they had plenty of time left over. Therefore, they could put great effort into making beautiful objects… Skåne archaeologists interpret bone remains in the settlement as evidence that people…hunted in a deliberate and sustainable way. They primarily chose the youngest and oldest deer, so that the herds could be preserved for future generations. … During the later period…, however, the settlement resembled a large village for hundreds of people. … The people seem to have indiscriminately hunted everything that could be eaten. … Tools…were made quickly and carelessly. Now it was only function that mattered …
—Karin Bojs, Min europiska familj: de senaste 54000 åren

The Master and the Emissary (the right and the left hemispheres of the brain) have different worldviews. This is described in detail by Iain McGilchrist in his two books:

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), and
The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021).

McGilchrist believes that “there has been a succession of shifts of balance between the hemispheres over the last 2,000 years”.¹ I believe this period can be extended over (at least) the last 10,000 years.

Reading Karin Bojs’ book, I get the impression that the shifts of balance between the hemispheres have repeat themselves over and over again. First there is an initial burst of energy, creativity, innovation, and skill, which then gets lost over time. The question is why? (And, then, of course, there is the introduction of slavery and human sacrifice some 5,000 years ago.)

I’d suggest the shift of balance between the hemishperes also is a shift of values. The only value the left hemisphere “sees” is utilitarian value. Iain McGilchrist writes (my emphasis in italics):²

The relationship between the hemispheres is…highly significant for the type of world we find ourselves living in. … And we can say fairly clearly what that would be like: it would be relatively mechanical…; it would be relatively abstract and disembodied; …given to explicitness; utilitarian in ethic; over-confident of its own take on reality… – …these are all aspects of the left hemisphere world as compared with the right.

Using the language of Robert S. Hartman’s Formal Axiology, one could say that the left hemisphere doesn’t “see” intrinsic value. This means that the left hemisphere only sees human beings as things that can be owned (slavery), rented (employment contract), or, if necessary, killed (collateral damage, ritual sacrifice). This is why the Emissary is such a terrible Master!

Robert S. Hartman believed that the “danger that threatens life” is the “tremendous gap between those who think in terms of human values [the right hemisphere’s worldview] and those who think in the collective terms of non-human systems [the left hemishpere’s worldview]”.³

This week, I have also started re-reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I think that David Graeber and David Wengrow ask the right questions:⁴

The ultimate question of human history…is not our equal access to material resources [extrinsic value]…, much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. …what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place [intrinsic value]. … What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such [intrinsic value]? What if…we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

Notice that Graeber and Wengrow values intrinsic value higher than extrinsic value. That is as it should be according to Formal Axiology.

Notes:
1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, p.
2. Ibid., p.
3. Robert S. Hartman, Freedom to Live: The Robert Hartman Story, p. 124.
4. David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, p.

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