The Church of Art - Part II

On the importance of art — Is it up to the artists to save us? What went wrong?

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The Church of Art - Part II

What Went Wrong?

This is Part II of a three part series titled, The Church of Art. This part looks at the thinking of western civilization that led us to great heights but is now causing us to regress and explores the type of thinking we need to embrace to enter the next phase of humanity. Can we stop the current Endarkenment and return to a new Enlightenment? If you wish to comment on this essay, I only ask that you read it in its entirety first. The entire essay is posted on my personal Substack, Clinsights, with comments open, at the following link:

The Church of Art

What Went Wrong?

Let’s turn to neuroscience:  Dr. Iain McGilchrist, in his book  book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, has explored detailed studies of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  

In the western world, the left hemisphere  dominates most of our thinking.  The left brain focus has allowed everything we’ve built in The Enlightenment — Science, technology, rational discourse, philosophy, public health, liberal (in the classic sense) democracy, individual rights.  

Those are indeed glorious achievements and triumphs of humanity.  However, the left brain’s style of analysis tends to “cut things up,” and study the parts.  This is how most mainstream science to date has been done.  

We keep cutting the world up into smaller and smaller parts and studying those parts - molecules got cut up into atoms, which were cut up into subatomic particles.  Cutting them up further we found they are made up of quantum particles.  In biology we cut species up into organs, cells, proteins, DNA.  

We have, by delving into smaller and smaller parts, made amazing discoveries about the nature of reality.  This left hemisphere cutting up tendency has led to human achievements that our forefathers, of just a few generations ago, would not have thought possible.  

It’s hardly been a century since mankind unlocked the secrets of flight, and yet we have already sent space vessels to the furthest reaches of the solar system, and we now have the technology, in astrophysics, to look back in time approximately 13.8 billion years.  

Our left brained society has built technology that borders upon magic.  Perhaps humanity needed to go through just such a left-brained, logical era in order to not stagnate as we did in the dark ages.

However, the left brain tendency to cut things into pieces, to divide things, doesn’t apply only to science.  It applies to everything, including other people.  

When patients have their brain’s right hemisphere temporarily disabled (thus perceiving the world only with the left hemisphere), they often can’t even register that another human in the room is alive.  

The left hemisphere sees everything — and everyone — as dead parts, as if one is taking a watch apart and studying the gears.  These patients can identify the parts of other people in the room: an arm here, a leg there.  When asked to sketch the person in front of them, these patients usually sketch a bunch of disjoined and separate body parts.

All magic has a price, and this particular magic has a big price tag: the division of humanity into factions that devalue and demonize one another.  It’s easier to hate the other side when you can think of them as inhuman objects rather than living, breathing, dreaming, loving people.

It turns out, that the right hemisphere is responsible for expanding outward, and viewing things holistically.  The right hemisphere sees  connections between parts; it sees living beings and systems; it has flashes of inspiration. It has intuition.  And it perceives our connection to other humans and intuits how we might all be part of something larger.  

The right hemisphere is the home of empathy, the home of the non-verbal, and, most relevant to our discussion, the home of Art.  It is the home of the spiritual — the home of The Mystery.

But, since The Enlightenment, western culture has valued left hemisphere style thinking, over the right, and, in a nutshell, McGilchrist believes that, to correct our wrongs, we need to reverse our values, and thus our thinking, and make the right hemisphere “The Master”, and the left hemisphere “The Emissary” (that carries out The Master’s orders).  In short, we need to learn to value right brained, holistic, creative, intuitive, inspired thinking.

Some will claim that the left-brained, right-brained split is pseudoscience.  It matters not if our divisions are truly based in the left brain or right brain.  We can simply admit that humans have two kinds of thinking, the symbolic, which is a greek word that literally means to bring things together.  And the diabolic,  which means “to throw things apart,” or to separate.  While much of our society engages in the “diabolic”, the symbolic is the realm of art.

What matters is that we can’t deny that these two styles of thinking do exist, and, collectively, we lean toward the dividing kind of thinking — the diabolic — over the more connecting and holistic type — the symbolic.  And dividing is the very essence of tribalism.  It’s “us” against “them.”  And everything bad in the world is “their” fault.

Whatever we call it, it’s obvious that our need to return to more holistic, a more symbolic, way thinking has never been greater, and yet, the institutions that should be looking at our situation holistically, with an eye toward increased connection and understanding — religion, politics, and spiritual practices — as we have seen, are either “left-brain” dominated — they are dividing us - are the institutions that are cutting our society up into pieces, or, at best, they are marginalized.

Perhaps it is not their fault.  After all, these institutions are us.  They were created by and are supported by us.  They are a reflection of who we are, collectively.  And we are, mostly, left brained new world men and women who value our materialist logic based order and, as a group, we tend to dismiss anything that falls outside of that order.  We have to admit that our society, at present, is diabolical.

So, how, given these challenges, can we re-connect?  

How do more of us learn to enter The Mystery and share in its ability to help each human find his or her true self?  

How do we lead people to integrate their spiritual, mental and physical sides healthily?  

How do we encourage more people to be “reborn” as transcended humans with mature psyches that have discovered the inner freedom and peace that can ripple outward to external freedom and peace?  How do we encourage people to become harmonized within so that we can work toward becoming harmonized collectively?

How do we learn to love again?

This idea of finding one’s “true self” is an important one.  I asked how we can encourage more people to come home into themselves.  I believe that the key to finding one’s true self is successfully integrating the material and the spiritual, the left brain and the right brain, the diabolic and the symbolic.  This requires creativity.  You are, after all, creating yourself.  

The reason it’s important is that we humans  seem to have a tendency, when we aren’t quite sure who we really are (which describes most people in modern culture), to mimetically follow others.  

When we aren’t fully self-actualized, we adopt our values from our tribes, rather than from the truths we find when our soul searches for them.  And, until we mature in this way, we aren’t quite centered and fully making our own decisions.  

Our bodies may look like adults, but inside, most of us, psycho-spiritually, are children.   This is reflected visibly in the plastic surgery distortion of  faces and bodies that some people undergo in their attempt to remain young looking.  We worship youth because we are children.  Unfortunately, children with great power are dangerous, especially when the childish tribes decide to go to war.  

If only people understood that the real fountain of youth is found inside of us - in our souls!  Become your true self and the world transforms into a wondrous playground!  Creativity makes one a child again!  

Bizarrely, people turn their souls into grouchy old curmudgeons, but then try to look young on the outside.  Reverse that!  Make yourself young on the inside.  

Lose the constant anxiety, stress, and worry.  Make the world your wondrous playground again and it will reflect in your body and face as well!  We’ve all met old people who have the laughter, charisma and wonder of a child.  I’d rather be around a person like that than a plastic LA Instagram “influencer” any day.  Depth is charismatic.  Shallowness is repelling.  Beauty is more than skin deep. Stop clinging to plastic beauty and start seeking transcendent beauty.

People have and do more than ever before, yet are still unhappy.  The number of people who are depressed or anxious has skyrocketed.  We’ve lost the joy and magic that an artful life brings.  We’ve forgotten how to simply be.  

I’ve painted a rather bleak picture.  However, there is hope.  We have lifeboats.

"The great religions are the ships, the poets are the lifeboats.  Every sane person I know has jumped overboard." - Hafiz

Next week, in Part III - we’ll get to the meat of this series - why I think artists and creatives may offer us our only hope forward.

If you’d rather read and comment on the entire essay now, it’s all available on my personal Substack at the following link. As I asked at the top, if you choose to comment, please read the entire essay first:

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