ETHICS IN PUBLIC LIFE: film, theatre and media

A BETTER PUBLIC SPACE

NOT JUST NICK KYRGIOS WHO IS LOSING CONTROL?

We are used to politicians and other public figures getting into trouble over their behaviour and anyone in public life is vulnerable to lurid and probably over-stated reports in the media - particularly in the 'silly season'. Now a tennis player has provided a springboard for the ever-readable Will Hutton to write (preach?) about the inner voice of restraint weakening in our society along with the well-documented decline in ethics in finance and business:

The inner voice that checks any of us in our naked pursuit of what we want seems ever weaker, he wrote on Sunday.

Not everyone will subscribe to Hutton's view that the 'wider philosophy of libertarian capitalism' is where our worst instincts find a home, but they may be less likely to disagree when he says: 

Modern life does not need to be so reluctant to embrace shame, duty and purpose - or be a place where individualistic self-preoccupation and lack of respect for others ride so high.

And if we agree, then what is it that has driven or even created this sad state of affairs? If not politics and the way our society is organised, then is it technology or globalisation or what?  Or maybe the 'gaps left behind' by a steady erosion of faith in the last few decades, as Madeleine Bunting - 'no longer a practising Christian' - made us wonder in her wide-ranging and articulate series of The Essay on Radio 3 last week. She talked on separate evenings about 'glory', 'sin', 'salvation', and patience, and one of the things she seemed to deplore  is the misplaced emphasis of the churches over the centuries on a Christian critique of human nature (mainly, she suggested, with the desire to manipulate society for imperialistic institutions' own ends). There was always less attention to 'structural sin', or our 'collective responsibility for social and economic systems which exploit and oppress people'. And now?

As Will Hutton argues for 'a better public space', we at Wychwood Circle will focus in September on ethics in film, theatre and media, thanks to Professor Martyn Percy who, amongst many other attributes, is adviser to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and previously worked with the Advertising Standards Authority. As Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, he doesn't have too far to come but we are fortunate that he has made time for us at the start of the new academic year. 


Wychwood Library, Sept 6th at 7.00 pm:  'Ethics in public life - film, theatre and media' - a talk and discussion led by the Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy.  As always, anyone is welcome, whatever their views. 

SILENCE, KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING

Two kinds of intellect

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), physicist, philosopher and mathematician, is famous for quotations from his Pensées, such as

We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

In the light of our recent Wychwood Circle discussions on the workings of our ‘Divided Brain’ (left hemisphere vs right hemisphere) it is interesting to read a bit about the duality of intellect and intuition as seen by Pascal, who distinguished between ‘two kinds of intellect’ or what he called the mathematical mind (meaning: logical, rational) and the intuitive mind. 

  

Others throughout intellectual history have also found it useful to suppose this duality.  In the Christian tradition Augustine of Hippo (354-430) talked about the higher and the lower mind:  for him the role of the higher mind was contemplation (of God, in his case) and the lower mind was for reasoning.  The fourth-century desert monk Evagrius (he of the 'Eight Thoughts') distinguished between 'ratiocination or discursive thought' and what he called ‘nous’, an intuitive spiritual intelligence. And Aquinas in the 13th century, like Augustine, talked about lower reason (ratio inferior) which thinks and calculates, and higher reason (ratio superior) which communes directly with God.  

To non-Christians and indeed many Christians, talk of contemplation and communion will set off alarm bells, though not of course to millions of people of more Eastern faiths.  So in 2015 the modern Divided Brain analysis is perhaps safer territory – even if the evidence from neuroscience is to date far from conclusive.  Yet the marked difference between the brain’s two hemispheres and how they process information, though still very much under investigation, has been known to neuroscientists for at least a hundred and fifty years, ever since Pierre Paul Broca discovered the location of language-processing skills in the left side of the brain, as Jonathan Sacks tells us.  Read a short summary of these differences in chapter two of his The Great Partnership if you don’t fancy the 500 pages of Iain McGilchrist.  Or view the June posts on this site. 

The idea of setting reason up as counterbalanced by ‘the heart’ has a long history, with an early saint called Diadochus (quoted by Martin Laird) referring to the heart as the deep centre of the person (and not the seat of the emotions, as emerges much later).  The Old Testament writings abound with references to the heart, not least in the psalms:

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God” (Ps 14)

I will walk with integrity of heart  (Ps 101)

And in the early twentieth century, the French author Saint-Exupery (author of The Little Prince) seems to echo Pascal:  ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly…’. 

What can we know?

So what did Pascal mean by ‘We know truth…”?  The Bishop of Worcester asked the question in an article back in 2013:  “So what do you know?”  Those of us who discussed the McGilchrist thesis in July or have been reading up on it since then will recognise where Bishop John is coming from.  And those who know their Dickens may hear echoes of the sarcastic opening of Hard Times:  “… In this life we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

McGilchrist is not the first to point out that in other languages there is a distinction between sorts of knowledge:  French has ‘connaître’ as opposed to ‘savoir’, German and Latin similarly.  The former is more akin to knowing someone, understanding them, but can apply to ‘encountering’ or fully understanding something as well as someone, maybe also to knowing truth.  As the Bishop, a former scientist, says:

We need both sorts of knowledge.  The problem is that, almost without its being noticed, the second kind is being increasingly privileged in our society, almost to the exclusion of the first. This is partly because it is the only sort of knowledge that science allows.

Which leaves us perhaps wondering how to acquire that additional knowledge if we too have been a bit left-brained for too long.  There is a series of BBC programmes running currently on Radio 4 entitled: ‘How can I know anything at all?’  One answer, which Martin Laird extols convincingly, is found in silence and contemplation.  There is no shortage of examples from Augustine and Evagrius onwards (and not just in the Christian tradition) of people who have sought to experience more than ‘facts’.  

One of them, less well-known than Evagrius or Augustine, was called Theoplan - again quoted by Laird.  Writing in the same spiritual tradition that saw the heart as the deep centre of the person, Theoplan said:

You must descend from your head to your heart. … Whilst you are still in your head, thoughts will not easily be subdued but will always be whirling about, like snow in winter or clouds of mosquitoes in the summer.

Another way is to study more serious fiction, poetry (On the Edge of Vision), music and art and see what our imagination can deliver up to us in terms of truth and reality.  Others will turn to philosophy (Andrew Davison).

Whatever works for each one of us, the words of T S Eliot must be worth recalling:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?   

                

This post owes a lot to a great little book by Martin Laird called Into the Silent Land - The Practice of Contemplation (London, 2006).  Laird is also one inspiration behind a new 'Midmonth Meditation' which takes place at Ascott under Wychwood's Trinity Church and is open to all, regardless of worldview or spiritual practice.  Forthcoming dates:  August 12th and Sept 15th from 6.15pm to 6.50pm. 

The next Wychwood Circle event is on September 6th at 7pm at Wychwood Library in Milton under Wychwood.  Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and advisor to the British Board of Film Classification, will talk about and lead a discussion on ETHICS IN PUBLIC LIFE. 

#UKCelebratesRamadan

Our friend Monawar Hussein, who visited Wychwood Circle in October 2014, has sent us the email below. 

June 27th 

Dear Friends

Please find attached a short message for the FCO that went live earlier today. 

My heart is deeply saddened with the horrific events of yesterday.  We pray for the victims, their families and friends at this tragic time ... and we remain committed to our work of drawing people together and affirming the message of mutual love, respect, reconciliation and healling. 

With blessings and in peace, 

Monawar. 

THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY

THE DIVIDED BRAIN AND THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN WORLD 

There are those who have read Iain McGilchrist's book from cover to cover - despite its being over 500 pages long and often both technical and scientific - and at least two of them hope to be with us at Wychwood Library on July 5th. Fortunately for the rest of us there are others who have been kind enough to produce summaries and excerpts which will at least give us a flavour. 

First of all the basics, with thanks to Jonathan Sacks:

“… since Pierre Paul Broca discovered the location of language-processing skills in the left side of the brain, neuroscientists have come to understand the marked difference between the brain’s two hemispheres and how they process information. The left hemisphere tends to be linear, analytical, atomistic and mechanical. It breaks things down into their component parts and deals with them in a linear, sequential way. The right brain tends to be integrative and holistic. …The right hemisphere is strong on empathy and emotion.  It reads situations, atmospheres and moods.  It is the locus of our social intelligence.  It understands subtlety, nuance, ambiguity, irony and metaphor.” 

Then the philosopher Mary Midgley in her review:

It is always Right's business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues.  Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually know what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence. 
Thus patients with right-brain strokes - but not with left-brain ones - tend to deny flatly that there is anything wrong with them.  And even over language, which is Left's speciality, Right is not helpless.  It usually has quite adequate understanding of what is said, but Left (on its own) misses many crucial aspects of linguistic meaning.  It cannot, for instance, graps metaphors, jokes or unspoken implications, all of which are Right's business.  In fact, in today's parlance, Left is decidedly autistic.  And, since Left's characteristics are increasingly encouraged in our culture, this (he suggests) is something that really calls for our attention. 

Next, McGilchrist's own words, in 3 excerpts from his Introduction, including a paragraph ("Things change...") which begins to get to the heart of the implications for our modern world: 

My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to cooperate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture. …

Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them.  This is important because the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world. But it’s important because of the widespread assumption in some quarters that there are two alternatives: either things exist ‘out there’ and are unaltered by the machinery we use to dig them up, or to tear them apart (naïve realism, scientific materialism); or they are subjective phenomena which we create out of our minds, and therefore we are free to treat them in any way we wish, since they are after all, our own creations (naïve idealism, post-modernism). … In fact I believe there is something that exists apart from ourselves, but that we play a vital part in bringing it into being. …

Ultimately I believe that … there are two fundamentally different ‘versions’ delivered to us by the two hemispheres, both of which have a ring of authenticity about them, and both of which are hugely valuable…

How do we understand the world, if there are different version of it to reconcile? Is it important which models and metaphors we bring to bear on our reality? And, if it is, why has one particular model come to dominate us so badly that we hardly notice its pervasiveness? What do these models tell us about the words that relate us to the world at large … that both describe and, if we are not careful, prescribe the relationship we have with it? …

[You can read the full introduction and see the chapter headings as a PDF.  The publisher also provides some selected pages here.] 

Finally you can listen to a condensed version of a talk by the man himself (11 mins 48 secs!) as a TED talk here - as we intend to do at our discussion in July. 

McGilchrist's thesis is not uncontroversial and some (who may or may not be present on July 5th) will be in a position to pick holes in either his evidence or his analysis.  Others may simply wish to discuss the implications for Western civilisation in the 21st century of what may be at least in part true. One such discussion in a blog by the RSA's Jonathan Rowson can be found here. It would be good to collect more critical views and reviews on this site ahead of, or following, our Wychwood Circle discussion. 

See under 'The Divided Brain' for details of the July 5th event at Wychwood Library.

THE DIVIDED BRAIN

On July 5th we will do our best to delve into the complex subject of our own brains, inspired by Iain McGilchrist.  There is a range of approaches to McGilchrist's thesis, ranging from his massive tome entitled The Master and His Emissary (Yale, 2009) through more accessible reviews, such as one in the Guardian by Mary Midgley, to commentaries by such people as A C Grayling and Salley Vickers.  There is also a summary in an RSA blog. 

At Wychwood Library we intend to spend at least 12 minutes watching a much-shortened version of a longer talk by McGilchrist which was given as a TED talk. But we know that there will be some present who have read the book or know enough to help us to understand it.  Either way there will be much to explore and indeed to debate. 

Join us on Sunday 5th July at the library in Milton under Wychwood at 7pm (until 9pm latest).  See next post for much more on The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. 

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