RAY'S VIEWS ONLINE

A friend sent me a link (https:\\unherd.com) to an interview featuring Iain McGilchrist (a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar). I found myself in agreement with much of what I was reading so, for once, instead of inflicting my own scribbles on you, here is a grouping of selected and edited extracts from what he had to say ….. 

“it’s dogma that’s always the problem .. There are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic. This is right, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong .. but .. there’s good and bad in almost everything.”

“I would say that a civilisation cannot thrive if differing points of view cannot be heard. Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest philosophers of the last 100 years, who was a German Jew and experienced Nazism, said that, Once something can’t be said, you’re already in a tyranny. So, it is indisputable that we are all now living, in Britain, in 2023, in a tyranny, because there are people who say, You can’t say these things and there will be terrible consequences if you do.”

“What I mean is that we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world; that we have some humility; that we re-kindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them down, vilifying them, telling them they’re frightful, but reasonably talking and saying, Okay, you disagree with me. I’m interested, explain your point of view.” 

“I think there are good scientists .. but .. Scientism is a faith. Much as there are religious fundamentalists, which I very much regret, there are fundamentalist atheists, who I regret just as much. I think a reasonable person is somebody who has an open mind.”

“I would say that any religion that peddles certainties is not a religion, properly speaking. It is a dogma or doctrine. Not that there’s no reality about it, but there is no single way of thinking about this or realising it or seeing it. Everybody has to make their own way there”. 

“All the great religions – and the great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism – have central truths that they hold in common, and these are a kind of wisdom that is not appreciated unless one is brought up in a tradition that helps one see them. And our tradition is dead against seeing them. It’s much simpler just to say, Oh, it’s all nonsense, because I can’t see any of this. I can’t measure any of it. But I don’t think that is reasonable”.

“We know that some things are key to human flourishing: proximity to nature; a culture; some sense of something beyond this realm .. my appreciation of the beauty of the world .. speaks to me of something beyond this realm. It’s not primarily either intellectual or emotional. In fact, it’s spiritual.”