Why We Can’t Tell Right from Wrong

It's all about the brain!

David Brooks had an article in a recent issue of The Atlantic focused on the late philosopher, Alastair MacIntire and his concerns about the absence of a moral code in modern societies. Brooks writes:

MacIntyre… argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?

Later he writes:

Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition.

Brooks ends with his solution to this dilemma—move towards a pluralistic society.

…The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one hand and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind. (emphasis added)

I have included these long quotes for a reason. I think Brooks has offered a valid analysis of our political stasis and lawlessness. MacIntire is an excellent choice on which to base his argument.

But Brooks hasn’t a clue about how to get to where he suggests we must go. “Recalibrate the culture.” Okay, but how? Social media are already doing that, but MacIntire might say that they, “have been leading us in the wrong direction.” “An education in morals” as rigorous as STEM has become. Really? He is falling back on the same principles coming from the Enlightenment that MacIntire claims have gotten us into this mess. Just add some new beliefs about right and wrong to our body of knowledge and our reasonableness will lead us along the right path. We will be taught how to become pluralists, that is, as Fitzgerald wrote, “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. OK, but how are we going to do that?

Missing here is any sense of what is really going on in our heads and how to change it. More education is definitely not the answer. Not surprisingly to my followers, I believe there is an answer to be found in divided-brain-model of Iain McGilchrist. All of the failures to act morally that Brooks, MacIntire, and others write about can be traced to the dominance of the left-brain in modern societies, or, conversely, the retreat of the right hemisphere into the deep background. Brooks’s way of conveying this, without being able to access McGilchrist, is, “Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual.” The autonomy of individuals arises from their left brain and its storehouse of beliefs about the world. Everyone’s hemispheric content is unique because it is based on their peculiar life experience and on the chunks, which they have selected/abstracted and packed away.

It is where the “I” resides. Of course, each left hemisphere contains some commonly held apprehensions of the world shared by communities. If it didn’t, collaboration within the myriad of institutional rules we live by inner daily lives would be impossible. The left brain drives the “I” engine of wants; the utilitarian machine of Smith and all of the economists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists that have followed in his footprints. It seeks certainty, which is the mortal enemy of pluralism. The essence of pluralism is the ability, as Fitzgerald wrote, to hold different, often, conflicting ideas at the same time and still being able to function coherently. When the body acts, driven by the left brain, its response to the present to drawn from the past and is limited by whatever is already stored away.

Morality and ethics are essentially rules for acting in the present in ways that reflect the reality of the now, the moment. They are not like traffic rules which are fixed and unchanging. What is right depends on the particular situation and one’s apprehension of its contextual wholeness. There may be nothing in the left brain that fits. In which case, the right will have to exercise its creative, imaginative powers to come up with the right action. The very idea of pluralism means that others have values and beliefs that must be considered in constructing any plan of action. Only the right hemisphere has access to the outside world where The Other lives. The left, as already noted, only knows the “I.” Pluralism also rests on empathy, including The Other in the process by which actions are produced. Empathy is a capacity of the right hemisphere.

Well, I could go on like this for a while but think I have made my point. If we are to rebuild our world on a moral/ethical basis, rebalancing our brains to produce a right-hemisphere dominance must be the first course of action. I say rebalancing because, as McGilchrist argues, there have been right-brain dominant societies in the past so we know such an outcome is possible, Further, brains are plastic in the sense that there structure can change depending on what we are experiencing. Newborns are strongly right brained and gradually switch dominance to the left as the individual learns how to live in a modern world. Most educational systems are strongly didactic; they fill up the left-brain with all sorts of junk. So Brooks’s plan is just not up to the job.

I have written about how to rebalance the brain in my book, The Right Way to Flourish: Reconnecting with the Real World. I have to admit that I am not at all sure what I suggest will work since it is the left-brain, not the right, that has come up with all the ideas. But, for sure, education according to modern pedagogical principles is not the way. Didacticism works at cross purposes—always adding stuff to the left hemisphere. Meditation works in the “right” way. Eastern cultures act in ways that indicate a stronger influence by the right side. Artistic, creative practices rely on the right-side. Secondary education seems to be going in the opposite direction, replacing artistic subjects with more STEM classes. Critical thinking exercises would forc the right-brain to examine and question the presumptions offered by the left, strengthening it in the prcess.

My main objective in this post was to alert you to the impotence of mainstream solutions to our present dilemma. Rationality will not get us to wherever we are trying to reach. As to the “right” way to go, we won’t know what works until we start doing something. We must be pragmatic—a right-brain driven process.

Coda: I have focused on the mess our modern societies have collectively gotten into, but there is another very important benefit to working to strengthen the right brain—human flourishing, the main subject of my book. We flourish when our actions reflect a balance between the two hemispheres that allows the empathetic, caring creature (Homo curitans) we are to emerge and keeps the needy, ego-driven being (Homo sapiens) within its proper place within all the institutions that govern human existence.