In this episode, Helena Norberg-Hodge talks to Iain McGilchrist. Iain is a one-of-a-kind thinker, an Oxford literary scholar as well as a doctor in psychiatry and neuroscience. His interdisciplinary achievements reflect his conviction about the importance of holistic thinking – a topic he has explored in-depth in his two ground-breaking works, ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’, and, more recently, ‘The Matter with Things’.
In this conversation, Iain and Helena employ a big-picture lens to critique artificial intelligence, corporate globalization, and the profit-orientation of science and academia. They ask some hard questions about how things might change – through collapse, through movement-building, through grassroots action, or through a combination of these? And they also articulate insights into who we are as human beings, what constitutes genuine intelligence, and what a fulfilling life really entails.
Excellent
Recent historical experience is clearly showing that material utilitarian mindset which characterises our civilization is self-defeating, blind as it is to soul of things and moral order of the universe
Absolutely! Utilitarian model is fully redundant and harmful.
Romanticism had plenty of cynicism, writers such has Robert Musil, Hermann Broch who lived the transition from romanticism to modernism, describe in their novels (the sleepwalkers) the issues of each of those isms. Romanticism was a modus of living restricted to high social classes, where cynicism ruled. Today we know better, we can do better. Perhaps we should look into existencialism.