Done with Doom

I keep thinking about a skit I once saw performed by the late, great Jeannette Clift George, founder of the A.D. Players theater company. In the skit, a woman (Jeannette) walked into a store and spotted a bottle simply labeled Joy. It was sitting next to a bottle labeled Pain. She picked up the Joy bottle and took it to the register. But the cashier refused to ring it up. Joy was part of a two pack. You had to buy the Pain bottle too. Of course, Jeannette only wanted the Joy without the Pain. But the cashier insisted you can’t have Joy without Pain.

This summer in Alaska I was mesmerized by pinkish purplish wildflowers that kept appearing in contrast to the otherwise rugged terrain. The flower’s official name is Chamaenerion Angustifolium. In Alaska, Canada, and the cooler U.S. climates, it’s called fireweed. Why? Because in the aftermath of a forest fire, that sturdy little flower pops up from the scorched earth. In England, they call it bombweed because it emerged from the bomb-ravaged soil during WWII, bringing beauty and comfort in the wake of great loss.

But of course, fireweed (or bombweed) doesn’t just sit there and look pretty. It has work to do. For one thing, it stabilizes and nurtures the soil with nitrogen necessary for other plant life to emerge. It serves as vitamin-rich food for a range of hungry creatures from bees and hummingbirds to elk, grizzly bears, and humans. Native Americans make fireweed syrup or jelly from the blooms and fireweed tea from the leaves. Fireweed is an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antiseptic. Even their seed pods produce a white feathery substance that helps pad nests and pillows. Whew. That’s a lot to say about the work of one little flower after a devastating loss. It’s easy to overlook the upsides to the downsides.

Maybe, the end of the world isn’t really the end of the world. Maybe it's the beginning of something new. In between doom-scrolling, I have come upon a fast-growing podcast called Know Thyself, the brainchild of 28-year-old André Duqum. I love it when super young people seem wise beyond their years. Duqum interviews scientists and philosophers, physicians, and others with incredible curiosity about what makes us humans do what we do. A recent interview was with Oxford fellow Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist. He’s known for two paradigm-shifting books, The Master and his Emissary (2009), then, more recently, a two-volume, deeply researched tome that took him 10 years to write, called The Matter With Things (2021). McGilchrist studies the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain.

He makes the case that for the past 350 years or so, the left hemisphere has been given the upper hand in our decision making. He challenges the notion that the left hemisphere of our brain is the more rational, reasonable mature adult side. Whereas, he says, we tend to view the right hemisphere as the airy-fairy side that skips around, paints pictures, writes poems, and generally needs monitoring by the left side. McGilchrist contends we have gotten the roles reversed. 

McGilchrist says the left brain deals mostly with the material world, the here and now in space and time. It divides, labels, and categorizes things. It sees what it sees and doesn’t think there is more. 

The left hemisphere is black and white in its thinking. It’s either this, or it’s that. There is no time for subtlety or nuance, for a bit of this or a bit of that; for the coming together of opposites. 

The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the intuitive side, experiencing the world around it, taking in multiple streams of thought. The right hemisphere wants to sit under a tree and ponder while the left hemisphere is in a hurry.

Everything in our life now tells us to speed up, to do things faster and faster and in doing so you can’t really appreciate anything….

The ridiculous way our lives are overloaded with answering the questions and ticking the boxes until your life is drained away from you. McGilchrist says this approach strongly influences our approach to education. 

The idea of education is putting information into children...that may be a byproduct of education and it’s an important one…but it can’t remotely constitute an education. An education is about drawing something out, not putting something in. 

McGilchrist says the good news is that scientists and philosophers are starting to come out of their silos and collaborate more, offering new hope for our ability to reach our human potential.

I call myself a hopeful pessimist. I see things going wrong all around me, but I remain hopeful. That’s because I believe, despite what is happening, that human beings are a wonderful species. We focus all the time on what we have done wrong…but we should be grateful for what we can achieve at our best, which is extraordinary. 

To view the whole interview, search Iain McGilchrist, Know Thyself. 

And while you are at it, there are many more fascinating interviews that offer hope. I, for one, feel like half my brain has just been let out of jail.