I have to say as an admirer of your writing that the subtle distance that Lyons was taking from Vance wasn't clear to me.
He says that Europe has been fighting an information war on the USA, yet is silent on the information war being waged against liberals from Russian actors at an industrial scale, nor how this is weaponised to give power to the far right. Nor how the US has turned on it's allies in favour of a clearly hostile power that threatens its own borders. What does Vance mean by free speech? Freedom to say anything to anyone at anytime? His administration doesn't seem at all keen on free speech they won't let dissenting voices speak at all and threaten physical reprisals if challenged - as witnessed obviously by not letting Zelensky speak, threatening universities if their students protest, and leaving thousands of troops unarmed overnight who they were previously supporting.
I've been thinking about your book and the way it focuses on paths to truth, and the need to do this to overcome the kind of postmodern nihilism where there is no truth only infinite subjective opinions. Vance and the administration he serves seems not interested at all in the truth and only interested in free speech where it gives the freedom to weaponised mis-truths half truths or lies. The kinds of confabulation you attribute to the left hemisphere seem highly present in this
I am sure you are right that there are more bad actors on all sides, and in an era of mis- and dis-information, it is (unless you are in the secret service? and even then), hard to know what the truth is. I hope you might agree with that. In such circumstances it is always good to hear another point of view, especially, as in Lyons's case, where he says he has uncovered information suggesting that official bodies in Britain acted in an authoritarian manner deliberately to suppress knowledge we should have had access to at the time about Covid, and close down all discussions of immigration and two-tier policing on crime. Unless you know he is wrong, and think that all is well in the Britain of 2025, his voice has to be a helpful corrective to the culture that insists there is only one narrative, and even to question it is to make oneself a kind moral leper. I think in other words, we hear a lot about the side of the story you prefer, but we should be in the habit of listening to others. As I am sure you are in daily life. Thanks for the comment, anyway – long live free speech! I welcome civilised discussion with people who have a different point of view from my own.
I think that whilst I agree that it might be hard to know what the truth is, it's quite possible to identify different kinds of power and approaches to power. We know quite a lot about how Russian has approached information warfare, how it uses information dumping to sow confusion, how it used anti-vaccination sites to drip feed clear lies and confusion about atrocities it has committed in Syria and Ukraine, and how it employs people en masse to inflame talking points that further create wedges in social media online. It's been highly successful in weaponizing resentments through anti-woke sentiments.
There are some great sections in your books that illuminate why that might be such a successful strategy. The fixation on being absolutely right combined with moral superiority seems highly toxic and likely to cause moral leprosy.
I think we identify what's true by attempting to evaluate the character of the person we are hearing from. In practice that's difficult, and more so online. But it's what we do naturally and we scale it up to countries. It doesn't surprise me that official bodies would attempted to supress or manage. information about covid or employ armies of fact checkers. I don't think the character of this is authoritarian in the same way as the explicit authoritarianism we are seeing in the US now and Russia. That has a very distinct character. It's reactive, violent and untrustworthy in a different way to the slippery charm of liberal politicians and their desire to control information.
I don't think that all is well in Britain, or online and I do think that progressive tendencies to make people into moral lepers has exacerbated resentments. I think we need to find a more inclusive dialogue. However, I wonder if it's not simply a matter of preferring a story, but in having a clear sense of who is telling it, what kind of idea is standing behind them telling it and what they want from telling it. I prefer your writing, on the whole, because it gives me that sense. I don't get it from Lyon.
Anyway, like I say, I appreciate your response, and will have a look at it again
With regard to your suggestion to follow The Upheaval, and the topic the link led me to, I find it a deep irony that the author writes in this fashion, but am not going to pay to tell him that.
The U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries—whether through outright military action, covert operations, economic pressure, or media influence—yet it often positions itself as the global arbiter of democracy and free speech. The hypocrisy becomes particularly glaring when it accuses European states of interference, especially given the much more nuanced and, in some cases, restrained approaches European nations take compared to the U.S.'s heavy-handed tactics.
The way the U.S. exerts control—whether through soft power, sanctions, or outright intervention—has shaped world politics for decades. And yet, it frequently deflects from its own actions by pointing fingers at others, especially when it comes to information control. The narrative management at home, where dissenting voices are marginalized or labeled as threats, mirrors the kind of suppression they accuse others of engaging in.
The article is more than a little disparaging to European countries, even if I agree that censorship in the West has become an oppressive force.
I enjoyed your exchange with Mike a great deal. You will, of course, have another chance to weigh in on his proposal for a "Platonic research program in biology" once we get the book from last year's conference together.
As for Lyons (and please do not feel obligated to reply to this--I totally understand your desire not to have to talk politics on this platform!), I am not sure if you saw my reply to his post a few weeks ago "American Strong Gods": https://substack.com/@footnotes2plato/note/c-95487319?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2at642 In short, I agree with his diagnosis of what is wrong. His account of the end of "the long 20th century" felt accurate to me. But I completely disagree with the way he celebrates "the new sheriff in town." I felt Lyons was too quick to dismiss the "never again" sentiment that guided the West after Nazism was defeated, and I really don't think he is giving due credence to the possibility that the MAGA movement or other authoritarian nationalist movements around the world could easily slide into very dangerous territory. He may be right about Democrats' and their European allies' attempted censorship of social media (even though it didn't work very well!); but Musk is now using his control over the X algorithm to boost nationalist parties in the UK and Europe. His own AI system--Grok--when asked who the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the platform is reliably points to Musk himself! Do two wrongs make a right? I'd just say, Lyons may be right about what he is criticizing, but he seems to me to be wrong in what he is celebrating. Time will tell.
I'm more optimistic than you are though I may well be proven wrong. This is partly because I think the political and cultural immune systems have hundreds of years of antibodies tuned to the threads of greed and narcissism that run through MAGA, whereas we're not well equipped to deal with the much more subversive totalitarian trends of which Lyons warns. I also just perceive the landscape differently - for instance I do not see an equivalence ("two wrongs make a right?") between Musk sharing disinformation on X on the one side, and the 4-dimensional octopus of international narrative manipulation on the other. The cancer in the system is deep, and some chemotherapy is needed. I like to think that wiping out the rot will be beneficial.
Of course, once as a kid I had a doctor with poor aim apply liquid nitrogen to a plantar's wart on my hand. The wart survived and expanded into the dime-sized circle of damaged skin. That could be the tech broligarchy. Time will tell. But the big push towards New Romanticism that is getting so much play lately makes me think they won't have an easy go of it.
You know I am a very great admirer of your work; your books changed my life, I am gladly a member of your site and I’ve listened to countless hours of your talks. So I was a bit disheartened or even worried about this post, mitigated of course in knowing your undoubted good character that will be searching for truth.
I noted your conversations above and if your central concern is that there was a period of time over the last ten years where a lot of nonsense - for want of a better phrase, woke - was blindly parroted, I agree. I also think the “narrative” of the left was dominant in a lot of western bureaucracies, institutions and media. That included at various times, private organisations having their agenda, and left-leaning governments seeking to enshrine in various ways their vision in policy where they could. Regarding COVID, I think nuance is needed. I’m fine with criticisms of the public health measures and the weird sanctification of taking COVID seriously, but it was just a pandemic that existed and needed to be treated, including by vaccines for those would take them.
However mainly what is worrying is the author conflates truth with frankly conspiracy theories and misattributes where power lies. He claims British intelligence services somehow did various jiggery-pokery and manipulated people’s views in the US (and the UK, but it’s unclear). Well, first of all, that does not seem to have worked, so if it existed, it wasn’t a particularly effective authoritarian plan. Second, it is epically fanciful. I’ve worked in our community for 15 years and I’ve never heard of the military intelligence mob he mentioned. A unit of that size might get to the low thousands, with a modest (some millions operating budget). The idea that a bunch of blokes in camo’s in rural England working with whatever likely annoying and out-of-date tech the MoD provided, could even cast a shadow on the technological, financial and now political power of even one of the US social media companies to shape public opinion in the US, UK or elsewhere, is fairy tale stuff. And more importantly, I don’t think they tried - I just don’t think any of that happened and have seen zero evidence of it.
What I do think the EU did, albeit in its uncompetitive and instinctively left-leaning way, is try to curb the power of US social media. So did Australia, before back-tracking, because the government feared the now undeniable impacts of it on the development of young people.
Which brings me to the nub of it. I worry mainly because your endorsement of his position seems to have you strange bedfellows with the interests of US tech, with their transhumanist impulses and Orwellian fusion of the most manipulative technology in history with incredible amounts of capital. I really don’t think Musk is someone at much risk of not being heard, and that you feel like the government’s of Europe defending the perceived interests, however clumsily, seems a misreading to me of where the greater worry lies.
More broadly, Vance wasn’t talking about the internet at Munich. He was disdaining Europe as a strategic actor, and seeing it through the US political culture wars. I was enormously heartened to see the vast majority of conservatives in the UK over the weekend instinctively side with Zelenskyy after the Oval Office performance on Friday. I think the real trick in these times of flux is not to hew too closely to any “side” - judge in issue in its merits, or the tree but its fruits. A good rule of thumb though is if I end up on the side of an actual authoritarian (Putin), or those that want to manipulate my attention for money (US tech), I should be asking for directions. It’s like seeing what I don’t want to be more than I know the right way. Having said that, I quickly read NS Lyon on some other topics - his Taiwan piece was very familiar territory for me and would say pretty standard and reasonable analysis, for example. Which is to say, each occasion and issue should be decided in its context, and I have no idea of his character or background, which matters more than anything. Ideas you helped reinforce to me.
I am not a political animal, and I really will regret coming onto Substack if I end up having to defend political positions against every reader who has a different position. Happen to like and respect Lyons. What I know is that there are more sides to most of the issues we discuss than are acknowledged, and it is definitely not reasonable to say that all the deceit comes from whatever one happens to call the' right'. I believe this to be a toxic position that has overturned our hard fought for, extremely unusual (in terms of world history), belief in free speech.. Please, I don't want to fall out with people on political grounds. There are bigger issues that I am concerned with that transcend the political infighting, and I hope we can be as reasonable as possible about them.
Iain that would never happen - you are an undoubtably great man, and your good faith is plain as day. Moreover, it’s a real pleasure and even privilege for us to be able to engage with you! I explicitly agree with your points above - the shallow-left-tilt of many of our institutions have made problems and blind spots that are now enormous issues for all of us. And I don’t know Lyons so can’t say. I just thought his article was - despite having some solid points - well, off. And some of what he said I have some experience in and made no sense to me. But that’s okay, I may well be wrong!
Thank you for engaging, I do appreciate it, and it’s a delight to have you on here.
I am grateful that your comments are open and a complete stranger like me can say something. You may regret this!
I confess to not loving NS Lyons. This is not his real name, which makes it very difficult to find out who his backers are, although it seems quite obvious.
I find his writing to be disingenuous. He pretends to be merely an observer of international events, but as a speaker at 'National Conservatism' events he clearly has skin in the game. I find him to be an apologist for some of the far right's worst excesses, all while pretending he isn't one of them. Since he is providing intellectual cover for the destruction of liberal democracy, I am certainly not going to pay for the privilege of sharing his propaganda.
I understand that many people might feel that. But I think public discourse has been manipulated by the 'liberal' - in reality authoritarian – left, so that the terms 'right' and 'far right' have lost their meaning. I think the only thing that matters is truth and this can exist on the 'left' or 'right' - no longer useful terms in my view. Much of what is now deemed 'right', or 'far right' even, would have been considered common sense by most people 20 years ago. But I do defend any person's right to put a less often voiced position before us, and I have found him consistently insightful, and never supporting violence, if that is what you are hinting at. Most of us are not wholly right, and it is valuable to have his voice heard, in my opinion. Thanks for your comment, all the same! Much appreciated.
I very much appreciate your reply and agree that other axes (such as authoritarianism) might be more helpful. However, I think it would very much help the search for truth if this person would let us know their real identity and who funds them.
While he uses a pen name, he's definitely not shy about revealing his face, so I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to figure out who he is. Not that anonymity bothers me (Ben Franklin wrote under a pen name). You can see this interview with him on UnHerd.
Wow, I can see why you’re excited! I drove across Connecticut today, and so was able to listen. I was shocked a few times in the most wonderful way, like when Mike said that “the solution is reaching out to the agent as much as the agent is reaching for the solution. Symmetry.” I so appreciate that you explored together the question of human creativity all the way down to the molecular level. How extraordinary.
I called my husband in the middle of it to tell him about the spectrum of animacy down to rocks and molecules. He has been talking to our friend, who builds with stones. Our stone building friend insists that all gems have a different good for us like the various good of garden herbs and plants.
I have no personal experience with Shinto, just curiosity, and I wonder how the topic of Kami (the spirit of a place or material?) would intertwine with your talk. It was just delightful to hear.
We had a neighbor in South Carolina who was a builder. There was a little cottage nearby that had been left vacant for two years and I asked him how the roof fell in so quickly? He told me that any house without a person living in it ages seven times as fast, so as far as that cottage was concerned, it was 14 years alone.
Anyway, I loved the conversation and am very glad to hear it! Thank you.
Dear Iain, very glad to see you engaging on Substack, you have many, many fans here -- interestingly enough across the entire political spectrum. It's a wild place!
Speaking of which, and the critical comments here regarding N.S. Lyons, I found that when one is triggered by a particular view, phrasing or take, and feels compelled to write a comment in the form of "praise, praise, BUT -- rant, rant", this often can be seen as an invitation to look at things differently, find another angle, reframe things, look deeper. This doesn't necessarily mean one has to agree with the offending thoughts, but usually there's something there, something that calls on you to develop a broader perspective, or perhaps rather allow it to develop, to find you in its own time. As the madness that is our world keeps unfolding, we are all called upon to refine and update our arsenal of perspectives, of frames, of our sense making modes.
Huge fan of your work, particularly TMWT, which has informed and inspired much of my own thinking and writing.
The best part of your conversation, to my ears at least, came at the end: Levin is "going to start looking for a lateralization of function" and "examples of processing that's associated with integration versus reductive analysis". This is truly exciting news.
As for the political stuff, I recall one of your most erudite exponents, Jonathan Rowson, once said: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forms. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical." [1] And, though the terms may share little connection, I do think of you as a "metamodern" thinker. You take into account both the transcendent and the immanent so we can see, as Blake so eloquently put it, the infinite in the definite, in a translucent way. Thank you for helping me to likewise see the world in this way. And when it comes to politics, to see through the words, no matter out of whose mouths they emerge, to the meaning behind them.
[1] Reflections on Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things - Pari Center Anniversary event
perhaps the phrase, "interpenetration" or maybe, "participation" helps with the mistaken sum problem?
maximos understood the person to be of course the microcosm, and mary is "more spacious than the heavens"- the created containing the whole of the creator within her being.
I think of ubuntu: a person is only a person through other persons.
or Silouan: that to love our neighbour as ourself, is to love our neighbour as being our self, and only in this act of loving the other does ourself emerge.
as far as "faculties we have, become atrophied," (around 17 or 18 minute mark),
Have you read much of Wade Davis? he's a fun storyteller, very egotistical but has seen the impossible, over and over, done by humans outside the reach of Modernity.
(he worked for Nat Geo of course and so went and just entered into the tribes, fearlessly seeking to experience and understand (perhaps foolishly and without enough self knowledge, but god knows))
Anyway his stories speak to exactly this intuition- or frankly truth- you have stated about our atrophied capacities.
one can see this also in the new popularization of psychedelics of course.
The toolkit the two of you are missing is the Theological Toolkit (I know, I know). Just give me one attempt at telling the story:
First, there was the ground of being, let's call it Gob. Then Gob wanted to play, co-create, co-rule, so things needed to get more complex. Gob created a place of earth, wind, fire, air by zimzum-ing and placed a duality there and gave the duality its very breath/wind/spirit; this allowed the duality to go out into this rugged land and pass this breath along. The duality wanted to play even more, so Gob split the duality in two, but the two still needed each other, so they wed into one while remaining two. All Gob asked for was trust so that they could keep playing and stay in relation to each other.
But the two that became one which came from Gob were lured into grasping for even more of Gob's marvelous abilities. Gob could no longer trust the two and saw no other option, but to push them further out into the rugged land. The two became many and began to occasionally build beautiful things that were in line with Gob's design, like music and bricks and tools. But the potential that burned within them, could also be used for destruction and division, like rhythmic calls for violence or building walls to separate or even turning tools into weapons. Gob watched from afar, trying to reach out and align the many with Gob's direction, but few would reach back to Gob.
In fact, Gob's cosmic creation got so out of order that it was nearly impossible to find a single from the many that was still functioning. Gob searched high and low and only found a single. Gob was committed to the project of creation, so Gob decided to change tacks and try playing with just a single grouping of the many: a line. Gob decided that as long as this line continued, creation could go on. And even if this one line veered into de-creation, this line would be easier to play with than trying to play with the many. As part of this new tack, Gob decided to undergo a massive de-creation project while only preserving the line and creation itself. The many would be wiped out by a great overflowing of energy, in order to play, co-create, co-rule once again...
It would take me quite a long time to do the whole thing, but this gets us to Noah and The Flood using the two of you's language (sort of). I'm 33 years old and I think have some pieces of the puzzle you're missing, which I know might sound arrogant, but I don't know how else to say it. There is a meta-pattern at the center which emanates patterns out from it like language, physical bodies, scientific disciplines and all these patterns seem to draw us in to the same place.
There's lots of roadblocks like money, which is potential. But when potential turns into piles, it seems to rot / corrupt / experience entropy faster and that rot seems to have physical effects on us; why is enough never enough? Every "ism" is an itch, begging for our hand. Also, we're still in an Enlightenment Hangover, using the language of machines and systems without even realizing it. We have to start remembering that there's pictures behind our words, which help us with the Meaning Crisis.
Typical that the comment section would first focus on your post-script. But nonetheless, thank you for drawing attention to Lyons. I first began paying attention to him after his excellent essay The China Convergence, which helped re-frame for me many patterns I had been observing in politics and culture. Whether I agree or disagree on any given point he makes, he does a good job of zooming out past the partisan narratives and suggesting broader systemic trends that map well on the the hemisphere hypothesis.
Back again after listening to this fascinating discussion, thank you for sharing it! I'll be very curious to hear if Mike discovers lateralization or patterns for integration/reduction in his models (for lack of a better word?)
Your explorations of negation also made me wonder if you've ever had a discussion with Peter Rollins about his Pyrotheology framework?
And thank you for the many rich seams around potential - that is a theme that I have been thinking about a lot lately in many contexts and hope to pull into a blog soon. It's wonderful to have some Whitehead to chase down on the subject.
Sparks of illumination fly whenever you two are in dialogue! I look forward (yes - with "excitement!) to the unfolding revelations that will come with future conversations -
Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist, for sharing so freely with the rest of us!
Iain you’ve got a Kirstie Cohen painting hanging behind your desk don’t you? She paints by adding layer upon layer. Has it struck you that this is the 2d version of your Michelangelo image who after all created (beauty, stuff) by taking away material. Kirstie works with the same principle because each layer of paint she adds takes away a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum: the colour effect doesn’t sit in the paint but it lives somewhere in the space left over by what that layer of paint absorbs. And because each layer is thin it allows the layer below to shine through. The beauty is that we humans get it without understanding anything about it.
Panpsychism, thankfully a reasonable approach, people say ‘open minded’, also to enforce an opinion.
If everything were of moving and of frequency, then why not a lower frequency of intelligence that also builds on itself with every difference?
In a world of differences, why would we insist on mimetic sameness?
But then there are languages we can never keep up with, so specialists as noted, end up talking to themselves quite inadvertently, maybe having too many left behind semantically, is what the meaning crisis is, people seem to scroll more and read less, ie: the book is read faster than it takes to consider the writing, so the information will be fragile because of the competition to question the how of knowledge.
How do you know, oh, because I read it! As to ‘living it’.
Really enjoyed your discussion with Mike Levin. Even the concept of the fitness landscape, used a lot in evo-bio (even by Dawkins) draws your attention to the fact that form can't really 'come from' genetics - genetics just finds the form (or Levin's patterns of voltage find it at a different level). Loved Levin's idea about the solution reaching out as much as the being reaching out towards it. Brilliant stuff.
I am already a n admirer of Josef Pieper,
I have to say as an admirer of your writing that the subtle distance that Lyons was taking from Vance wasn't clear to me.
He says that Europe has been fighting an information war on the USA, yet is silent on the information war being waged against liberals from Russian actors at an industrial scale, nor how this is weaponised to give power to the far right. Nor how the US has turned on it's allies in favour of a clearly hostile power that threatens its own borders. What does Vance mean by free speech? Freedom to say anything to anyone at anytime? His administration doesn't seem at all keen on free speech they won't let dissenting voices speak at all and threaten physical reprisals if challenged - as witnessed obviously by not letting Zelensky speak, threatening universities if their students protest, and leaving thousands of troops unarmed overnight who they were previously supporting.
I've been thinking about your book and the way it focuses on paths to truth, and the need to do this to overcome the kind of postmodern nihilism where there is no truth only infinite subjective opinions. Vance and the administration he serves seems not interested at all in the truth and only interested in free speech where it gives the freedom to weaponised mis-truths half truths or lies. The kinds of confabulation you attribute to the left hemisphere seem highly present in this
I am sure you are right that there are more bad actors on all sides, and in an era of mis- and dis-information, it is (unless you are in the secret service? and even then), hard to know what the truth is. I hope you might agree with that. In such circumstances it is always good to hear another point of view, especially, as in Lyons's case, where he says he has uncovered information suggesting that official bodies in Britain acted in an authoritarian manner deliberately to suppress knowledge we should have had access to at the time about Covid, and close down all discussions of immigration and two-tier policing on crime. Unless you know he is wrong, and think that all is well in the Britain of 2025, his voice has to be a helpful corrective to the culture that insists there is only one narrative, and even to question it is to make oneself a kind moral leper. I think in other words, we hear a lot about the side of the story you prefer, but we should be in the habit of listening to others. As I am sure you are in daily life. Thanks for the comment, anyway – long live free speech! I welcome civilised discussion with people who have a different point of view from my own.
Thanks Iain. I appreciate your response.
I think that whilst I agree that it might be hard to know what the truth is, it's quite possible to identify different kinds of power and approaches to power. We know quite a lot about how Russian has approached information warfare, how it uses information dumping to sow confusion, how it used anti-vaccination sites to drip feed clear lies and confusion about atrocities it has committed in Syria and Ukraine, and how it employs people en masse to inflame talking points that further create wedges in social media online. It's been highly successful in weaponizing resentments through anti-woke sentiments.
There are some great sections in your books that illuminate why that might be such a successful strategy. The fixation on being absolutely right combined with moral superiority seems highly toxic and likely to cause moral leprosy.
I think we identify what's true by attempting to evaluate the character of the person we are hearing from. In practice that's difficult, and more so online. But it's what we do naturally and we scale it up to countries. It doesn't surprise me that official bodies would attempted to supress or manage. information about covid or employ armies of fact checkers. I don't think the character of this is authoritarian in the same way as the explicit authoritarianism we are seeing in the US now and Russia. That has a very distinct character. It's reactive, violent and untrustworthy in a different way to the slippery charm of liberal politicians and their desire to control information.
I don't think that all is well in Britain, or online and I do think that progressive tendencies to make people into moral lepers has exacerbated resentments. I think we need to find a more inclusive dialogue. However, I wonder if it's not simply a matter of preferring a story, but in having a clear sense of who is telling it, what kind of idea is standing behind them telling it and what they want from telling it. I prefer your writing, on the whole, because it gives me that sense. I don't get it from Lyon.
Anyway, like I say, I appreciate your response, and will have a look at it again
And thanks for yours, Toby, with which I agree.
Thanks so much for articulating your thoughts. I had read the Lyon article and couldn't understand what was so remarkable about it.
With regard to your suggestion to follow The Upheaval, and the topic the link led me to, I find it a deep irony that the author writes in this fashion, but am not going to pay to tell him that.
The U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries—whether through outright military action, covert operations, economic pressure, or media influence—yet it often positions itself as the global arbiter of democracy and free speech. The hypocrisy becomes particularly glaring when it accuses European states of interference, especially given the much more nuanced and, in some cases, restrained approaches European nations take compared to the U.S.'s heavy-handed tactics.
The way the U.S. exerts control—whether through soft power, sanctions, or outright intervention—has shaped world politics for decades. And yet, it frequently deflects from its own actions by pointing fingers at others, especially when it comes to information control. The narrative management at home, where dissenting voices are marginalized or labeled as threats, mirrors the kind of suppression they accuse others of engaging in.
The article is more than a little disparaging to European countries, even if I agree that censorship in the West has become an oppressive force.
Iain,
I enjoyed your exchange with Mike a great deal. You will, of course, have another chance to weigh in on his proposal for a "Platonic research program in biology" once we get the book from last year's conference together.
As for Lyons (and please do not feel obligated to reply to this--I totally understand your desire not to have to talk politics on this platform!), I am not sure if you saw my reply to his post a few weeks ago "American Strong Gods": https://substack.com/@footnotes2plato/note/c-95487319?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2at642 In short, I agree with his diagnosis of what is wrong. His account of the end of "the long 20th century" felt accurate to me. But I completely disagree with the way he celebrates "the new sheriff in town." I felt Lyons was too quick to dismiss the "never again" sentiment that guided the West after Nazism was defeated, and I really don't think he is giving due credence to the possibility that the MAGA movement or other authoritarian nationalist movements around the world could easily slide into very dangerous territory. He may be right about Democrats' and their European allies' attempted censorship of social media (even though it didn't work very well!); but Musk is now using his control over the X algorithm to boost nationalist parties in the UK and Europe. His own AI system--Grok--when asked who the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the platform is reliably points to Musk himself! Do two wrongs make a right? I'd just say, Lyons may be right about what he is criticizing, but he seems to me to be wrong in what he is celebrating. Time will tell.
Yours,
Matt
I'm more optimistic than you are though I may well be proven wrong. This is partly because I think the political and cultural immune systems have hundreds of years of antibodies tuned to the threads of greed and narcissism that run through MAGA, whereas we're not well equipped to deal with the much more subversive totalitarian trends of which Lyons warns. I also just perceive the landscape differently - for instance I do not see an equivalence ("two wrongs make a right?") between Musk sharing disinformation on X on the one side, and the 4-dimensional octopus of international narrative manipulation on the other. The cancer in the system is deep, and some chemotherapy is needed. I like to think that wiping out the rot will be beneficial.
Of course, once as a kid I had a doctor with poor aim apply liquid nitrogen to a plantar's wart on my hand. The wart survived and expanded into the dime-sized circle of damaged skin. That could be the tech broligarchy. Time will tell. But the big push towards New Romanticism that is getting so much play lately makes me think they won't have an easy go of it.
Well said, Matthew!
Dear Iain,
You know I am a very great admirer of your work; your books changed my life, I am gladly a member of your site and I’ve listened to countless hours of your talks. So I was a bit disheartened or even worried about this post, mitigated of course in knowing your undoubted good character that will be searching for truth.
I noted your conversations above and if your central concern is that there was a period of time over the last ten years where a lot of nonsense - for want of a better phrase, woke - was blindly parroted, I agree. I also think the “narrative” of the left was dominant in a lot of western bureaucracies, institutions and media. That included at various times, private organisations having their agenda, and left-leaning governments seeking to enshrine in various ways their vision in policy where they could. Regarding COVID, I think nuance is needed. I’m fine with criticisms of the public health measures and the weird sanctification of taking COVID seriously, but it was just a pandemic that existed and needed to be treated, including by vaccines for those would take them.
However mainly what is worrying is the author conflates truth with frankly conspiracy theories and misattributes where power lies. He claims British intelligence services somehow did various jiggery-pokery and manipulated people’s views in the US (and the UK, but it’s unclear). Well, first of all, that does not seem to have worked, so if it existed, it wasn’t a particularly effective authoritarian plan. Second, it is epically fanciful. I’ve worked in our community for 15 years and I’ve never heard of the military intelligence mob he mentioned. A unit of that size might get to the low thousands, with a modest (some millions operating budget). The idea that a bunch of blokes in camo’s in rural England working with whatever likely annoying and out-of-date tech the MoD provided, could even cast a shadow on the technological, financial and now political power of even one of the US social media companies to shape public opinion in the US, UK or elsewhere, is fairy tale stuff. And more importantly, I don’t think they tried - I just don’t think any of that happened and have seen zero evidence of it.
What I do think the EU did, albeit in its uncompetitive and instinctively left-leaning way, is try to curb the power of US social media. So did Australia, before back-tracking, because the government feared the now undeniable impacts of it on the development of young people.
Which brings me to the nub of it. I worry mainly because your endorsement of his position seems to have you strange bedfellows with the interests of US tech, with their transhumanist impulses and Orwellian fusion of the most manipulative technology in history with incredible amounts of capital. I really don’t think Musk is someone at much risk of not being heard, and that you feel like the government’s of Europe defending the perceived interests, however clumsily, seems a misreading to me of where the greater worry lies.
More broadly, Vance wasn’t talking about the internet at Munich. He was disdaining Europe as a strategic actor, and seeing it through the US political culture wars. I was enormously heartened to see the vast majority of conservatives in the UK over the weekend instinctively side with Zelenskyy after the Oval Office performance on Friday. I think the real trick in these times of flux is not to hew too closely to any “side” - judge in issue in its merits, or the tree but its fruits. A good rule of thumb though is if I end up on the side of an actual authoritarian (Putin), or those that want to manipulate my attention for money (US tech), I should be asking for directions. It’s like seeing what I don’t want to be more than I know the right way. Having said that, I quickly read NS Lyon on some other topics - his Taiwan piece was very familiar territory for me and would say pretty standard and reasonable analysis, for example. Which is to say, each occasion and issue should be decided in its context, and I have no idea of his character or background, which matters more than anything. Ideas you helped reinforce to me.
I am not a political animal, and I really will regret coming onto Substack if I end up having to defend political positions against every reader who has a different position. Happen to like and respect Lyons. What I know is that there are more sides to most of the issues we discuss than are acknowledged, and it is definitely not reasonable to say that all the deceit comes from whatever one happens to call the' right'. I believe this to be a toxic position that has overturned our hard fought for, extremely unusual (in terms of world history), belief in free speech.. Please, I don't want to fall out with people on political grounds. There are bigger issues that I am concerned with that transcend the political infighting, and I hope we can be as reasonable as possible about them.
Iain that would never happen - you are an undoubtably great man, and your good faith is plain as day. Moreover, it’s a real pleasure and even privilege for us to be able to engage with you! I explicitly agree with your points above - the shallow-left-tilt of many of our institutions have made problems and blind spots that are now enormous issues for all of us. And I don’t know Lyons so can’t say. I just thought his article was - despite having some solid points - well, off. And some of what he said I have some experience in and made no sense to me. But that’s okay, I may well be wrong!
Thank you for engaging, I do appreciate it, and it’s a delight to have you on here.
I am grateful that your comments are open and a complete stranger like me can say something. You may regret this!
I confess to not loving NS Lyons. This is not his real name, which makes it very difficult to find out who his backers are, although it seems quite obvious.
I find his writing to be disingenuous. He pretends to be merely an observer of international events, but as a speaker at 'National Conservatism' events he clearly has skin in the game. I find him to be an apologist for some of the far right's worst excesses, all while pretending he isn't one of them. Since he is providing intellectual cover for the destruction of liberal democracy, I am certainly not going to pay for the privilege of sharing his propaganda.
I understand that many people might feel that. But I think public discourse has been manipulated by the 'liberal' - in reality authoritarian – left, so that the terms 'right' and 'far right' have lost their meaning. I think the only thing that matters is truth and this can exist on the 'left' or 'right' - no longer useful terms in my view. Much of what is now deemed 'right', or 'far right' even, would have been considered common sense by most people 20 years ago. But I do defend any person's right to put a less often voiced position before us, and I have found him consistently insightful, and never supporting violence, if that is what you are hinting at. Most of us are not wholly right, and it is valuable to have his voice heard, in my opinion. Thanks for your comment, all the same! Much appreciated.
I very much appreciate your reply and agree that other axes (such as authoritarianism) might be more helpful. However, I think it would very much help the search for truth if this person would let us know their real identity and who funds them.
While he uses a pen name, he's definitely not shy about revealing his face, so I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to figure out who he is. Not that anonymity bothers me (Ben Franklin wrote under a pen name). You can see this interview with him on UnHerd.
https://youtu.be/-lNDgLR_DSI?feature=shared
Wow, I can see why you’re excited! I drove across Connecticut today, and so was able to listen. I was shocked a few times in the most wonderful way, like when Mike said that “the solution is reaching out to the agent as much as the agent is reaching for the solution. Symmetry.” I so appreciate that you explored together the question of human creativity all the way down to the molecular level. How extraordinary.
I called my husband in the middle of it to tell him about the spectrum of animacy down to rocks and molecules. He has been talking to our friend, who builds with stones. Our stone building friend insists that all gems have a different good for us like the various good of garden herbs and plants.
I have no personal experience with Shinto, just curiosity, and I wonder how the topic of Kami (the spirit of a place or material?) would intertwine with your talk. It was just delightful to hear.
We had a neighbor in South Carolina who was a builder. There was a little cottage nearby that had been left vacant for two years and I asked him how the roof fell in so quickly? He told me that any house without a person living in it ages seven times as fast, so as far as that cottage was concerned, it was 14 years alone.
Anyway, I loved the conversation and am very glad to hear it! Thank you.
I'm so glad you felt the excitement I too felt! And thanks for writing to tell me.
Iain
Dear Iain, very glad to see you engaging on Substack, you have many, many fans here -- interestingly enough across the entire political spectrum. It's a wild place!
Speaking of which, and the critical comments here regarding N.S. Lyons, I found that when one is triggered by a particular view, phrasing or take, and feels compelled to write a comment in the form of "praise, praise, BUT -- rant, rant", this often can be seen as an invitation to look at things differently, find another angle, reframe things, look deeper. This doesn't necessarily mean one has to agree with the offending thoughts, but usually there's something there, something that calls on you to develop a broader perspective, or perhaps rather allow it to develop, to find you in its own time. As the madness that is our world keeps unfolding, we are all called upon to refine and update our arsenal of perspectives, of frames, of our sense making modes.
Huge fan of your work, particularly TMWT, which has informed and inspired much of my own thinking and writing.
The best part of your conversation, to my ears at least, came at the end: Levin is "going to start looking for a lateralization of function" and "examples of processing that's associated with integration versus reductive analysis". This is truly exciting news.
As for the political stuff, I recall one of your most erudite exponents, Jonathan Rowson, once said: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forms. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical." [1] And, though the terms may share little connection, I do think of you as a "metamodern" thinker. You take into account both the transcendent and the immanent so we can see, as Blake so eloquently put it, the infinite in the definite, in a translucent way. Thank you for helping me to likewise see the world in this way. And when it comes to politics, to see through the words, no matter out of whose mouths they emerge, to the meaning behind them.
[1] Reflections on Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things - Pari Center Anniversary event
https://youtu.be/CWSctIuLdUY?t=6857
perhaps the phrase, "interpenetration" or maybe, "participation" helps with the mistaken sum problem?
maximos understood the person to be of course the microcosm, and mary is "more spacious than the heavens"- the created containing the whole of the creator within her being.
And then as far as co-creation:
I think of ubuntu: a person is only a person through other persons.
or Silouan: that to love our neighbour as ourself, is to love our neighbour as being our self, and only in this act of loving the other does ourself emerge.
(sorry sort of commenting as I'm listening ;)
as far as "faculties we have, become atrophied," (around 17 or 18 minute mark),
Have you read much of Wade Davis? he's a fun storyteller, very egotistical but has seen the impossible, over and over, done by humans outside the reach of Modernity.
(he worked for Nat Geo of course and so went and just entered into the tribes, fearlessly seeking to experience and understand (perhaps foolishly and without enough self knowledge, but god knows))
Anyway his stories speak to exactly this intuition- or frankly truth- you have stated about our atrophied capacities.
one can see this also in the new popularization of psychedelics of course.
yours;
-mb
The toolkit the two of you are missing is the Theological Toolkit (I know, I know). Just give me one attempt at telling the story:
First, there was the ground of being, let's call it Gob. Then Gob wanted to play, co-create, co-rule, so things needed to get more complex. Gob created a place of earth, wind, fire, air by zimzum-ing and placed a duality there and gave the duality its very breath/wind/spirit; this allowed the duality to go out into this rugged land and pass this breath along. The duality wanted to play even more, so Gob split the duality in two, but the two still needed each other, so they wed into one while remaining two. All Gob asked for was trust so that they could keep playing and stay in relation to each other.
But the two that became one which came from Gob were lured into grasping for even more of Gob's marvelous abilities. Gob could no longer trust the two and saw no other option, but to push them further out into the rugged land. The two became many and began to occasionally build beautiful things that were in line with Gob's design, like music and bricks and tools. But the potential that burned within them, could also be used for destruction and division, like rhythmic calls for violence or building walls to separate or even turning tools into weapons. Gob watched from afar, trying to reach out and align the many with Gob's direction, but few would reach back to Gob.
In fact, Gob's cosmic creation got so out of order that it was nearly impossible to find a single from the many that was still functioning. Gob searched high and low and only found a single. Gob was committed to the project of creation, so Gob decided to change tacks and try playing with just a single grouping of the many: a line. Gob decided that as long as this line continued, creation could go on. And even if this one line veered into de-creation, this line would be easier to play with than trying to play with the many. As part of this new tack, Gob decided to undergo a massive de-creation project while only preserving the line and creation itself. The many would be wiped out by a great overflowing of energy, in order to play, co-create, co-rule once again...
It would take me quite a long time to do the whole thing, but this gets us to Noah and The Flood using the two of you's language (sort of). I'm 33 years old and I think have some pieces of the puzzle you're missing, which I know might sound arrogant, but I don't know how else to say it. There is a meta-pattern at the center which emanates patterns out from it like language, physical bodies, scientific disciplines and all these patterns seem to draw us in to the same place.
There's lots of roadblocks like money, which is potential. But when potential turns into piles, it seems to rot / corrupt / experience entropy faster and that rot seems to have physical effects on us; why is enough never enough? Every "ism" is an itch, begging for our hand. Also, we're still in an Enlightenment Hangover, using the language of machines and systems without even realizing it. We have to start remembering that there's pictures behind our words, which help us with the Meaning Crisis.
Ta ta for now.
Typical that the comment section would first focus on your post-script. But nonetheless, thank you for drawing attention to Lyons. I first began paying attention to him after his excellent essay The China Convergence, which helped re-frame for me many patterns I had been observing in politics and culture. Whether I agree or disagree on any given point he makes, he does a good job of zooming out past the partisan narratives and suggesting broader systemic trends that map well on the the hemisphere hypothesis.
I totally agree!
Back again after listening to this fascinating discussion, thank you for sharing it! I'll be very curious to hear if Mike discovers lateralization or patterns for integration/reduction in his models (for lack of a better word?)
Your explorations of negation also made me wonder if you've ever had a discussion with Peter Rollins about his Pyrotheology framework?
And thank you for the many rich seams around potential - that is a theme that I have been thinking about a lot lately in many contexts and hope to pull into a blog soon. It's wonderful to have some Whitehead to chase down on the subject.
Warm regards!
Sparks of illumination fly whenever you two are in dialogue! I look forward (yes - with "excitement!) to the unfolding revelations that will come with future conversations -
Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist, for sharing so freely with the rest of us!
Iain you’ve got a Kirstie Cohen painting hanging behind your desk don’t you? She paints by adding layer upon layer. Has it struck you that this is the 2d version of your Michelangelo image who after all created (beauty, stuff) by taking away material. Kirstie works with the same principle because each layer of paint she adds takes away a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum: the colour effect doesn’t sit in the paint but it lives somewhere in the space left over by what that layer of paint absorbs. And because each layer is thin it allows the layer below to shine through. The beauty is that we humans get it without understanding anything about it.
Panpsychism, thankfully a reasonable approach, people say ‘open minded’, also to enforce an opinion.
If everything were of moving and of frequency, then why not a lower frequency of intelligence that also builds on itself with every difference?
In a world of differences, why would we insist on mimetic sameness?
But then there are languages we can never keep up with, so specialists as noted, end up talking to themselves quite inadvertently, maybe having too many left behind semantically, is what the meaning crisis is, people seem to scroll more and read less, ie: the book is read faster than it takes to consider the writing, so the information will be fragile because of the competition to question the how of knowledge.
How do you know, oh, because I read it! As to ‘living it’.
Really enjoyed your discussion with Mike Levin. Even the concept of the fitness landscape, used a lot in evo-bio (even by Dawkins) draws your attention to the fact that form can't really 'come from' genetics - genetics just finds the form (or Levin's patterns of voltage find it at a different level). Loved Levin's idea about the solution reaching out as much as the being reaching out towards it. Brilliant stuff.