Bread Alone

The left hemisphere of the brain is pragmatic and utilitarian. It has no emotion but language and logic. It deals with inanimate objects and manipulates them for practical purposes. It controls the grasping right hand. It is prone to dogmatism, claims of certainty, and confabulation. This is the “bread” Jesus rejects when tempted by the devil, saying, “Man cannot live on bread alone.”

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, claims in the latter book that the core of the religious impulse is to emphasize and restore a connection to the mysterious right hemisphere, the part of us that is the most human. It provides our intuitive sense of the reality around us, the deficiency of which gives schizophrenics their problems. An over-emphasis on the left hemisphere disconnects us from the world and makes us resemble the mentally ill. Autism also contains this exaggerated logicality and attention to detail, with an attendant difficulty with Gestalts, narratives, and meaning (connections to context).

Thus, religion and sanity are connected. From this point of view, good poetry, humor, literature, music, the movies of someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, and good fine art are all religious. Certainly, Tarkovsky thought so, stating that his movies and all legitimate art are prayers to God. His movie Stalker can be seen as an allegory about Tarkovsky’s attempts to restore faith and belief to a skeptical age. Stalker takes two cynics into “the Zone,” which can be interpreted as the areas of consciousness associated with the right hemisphere. With little language and its broad focus on the wider context, it cannot be articulated explicitly—great poetry, however, artistically. Antonio Machado is a poet of the human soul.

Last Night, As I Was Sleeping

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh, water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I lay sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Tarkovsky writes that when the last believer dies, so will humanity. We will have lost what made us human and become a new lapsed species. A God-shaped hole makes no room for faith and hope, and nothing will stop us from falling into nihilism.

Roger Scruton comments in Why Beauty Matters that merely “useful” buildings built solely for their supposed “function” become neither useful nor functional because nobody wants to work or live in them. They will quickly fall into disrepair and become useless, whereas a beautiful building provides a reason to try to preserve it. Beautiful buildings do not need to be expensive. Sometimes, minimal decorative elements are all it takes to make it a pleasure to be around. This is demonstrated in Graz, Austria, where newer versions of the buildings, some of which date back hundreds of years, lack the subtle ornamentation of the old and are all the poorer for it. Glass and steel monstrosities may be relatively cheap and fast to construct; however, they are expensive to heat and cool. These comments about buildings can be read as an allegory about life itself. Paying attention to prudence is necessary but insufficient for a well-lived life. Allan Bloom’s translation of Plato’s Republic was marred by his repeated translation of sophrosyne (moderation, temperance) as “prudence,” making Plato sound overly pragmatic, small-minded, and anti-spiritual. Is it, after all, prudent to become a philosopher?

Meditation and non-petitionary contemplative prayer are partly about spending time in a state of mind that brings right hemisphere elements to the fore, the ego residing as it does in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is responsible for paying attention to physiological processes, so the Zen practice of focusing on the breath helps point one in that direction. It has been postulated that when Jesus goes to pray at the Garden of Gethsemane for so long that the disciples fall asleep, it is unlikely that he spent all that time petitioning his Father. The border between where you end and the rest of the world begins is all but erased in meditation, keeping with Jesus’ statement that “I and the Father are one.” As such, it is a recipe for overcoming alienation and feeling connection. Jill Bolte Taylor writes of it in her My Stroke of Genius, when a stroke stopped her left hemisphere from functioning. While leaving her incapacitated at the time, she also found it rather wonderful, and she had to force herself to get help. Praying for others is also about love and connection, as is being useful to them, not merely to oneself.

Problem-solving is done in the right hemisphere, which is thus inherently involved with creativity and imagination, both spiritual. In contrast, the left hemisphere is responsible for skills already learned and thus robotic. Things there are clear and known. The right hemisphere, conversely, is connected to mystery and the yet-to-be-discovered newness and the living God. Creation requires freedom, a rule for creativity being a contradiction in terms. One must reach into the Ungrund, the causeless cause, and pull out of it an original item inflected with one’s personality, acquired skills and knowledge, taste, and life history. A solution to artistic and scientific problems often comes in one’s sleep or after focus is removed from the task at hand (the left hemisphere), and the unconscious can get on with the task of construction.

Like all healthy-minded individuals, early man had a well-functioning and dominant right hemisphere and regarded the world as alive. Consequently, his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC, contributed to what he perceived. Every stone, tree, and rock possessed its living god within it, from his point of view. The vmPFC reaches down into the limbic system and brings the insight of emotion into its contemplations. Without it, we know from transcranial magnetic stimulation that the dorso lateral PFC, dlPFC, makes decisions in an amoral fashion. It turns us into heartless consequentialists, ready to sacrifice family members in its robotic calculations, as anybody else.

There are those of us for whom the vmPFC seems permanently engaged. We are a throwback to this ancestral figure, or perhaps this is just the nature of the religious and philosophical mind, like philosophy, as Plato understood it. Emotion provides impetus to actually do something; thus, it is connected to wisdom. Wisdom is not acing a test, being good at winning arguments, or having a high IQ. It is, at minimum, to exhibit the Greek virtues of generosity, courage, moderation, and justice. An overly scared, stingy, unjust, self-indulgent person is not wise. As Aristotle suggests, ethics is not about having the capacity to do something but to live well. Practical intelligence is required to exhibit these virtues in context, which is the only place they are demonstrated to exist.

An evolutionary psychologist like Edward Dutton says believing in God is an “over-detection of agency.” Take away the negative value judgment, which turns into “a detection of agency.” Moreover, it is “detected” by feeling and intuition. This, too, is associated with a kind of animism, experiencing the world and universe as alive and purposeful.

The irreligious detect nothing but an absence—a dead, materialistic, purposeless hellhole. For the well-functioning among this group, the vmPFC, and thus intelligent emotion, only come into play when in an ethical or social context. For a philosopher or thinker of my variety, all big questions about AI or cosmology, physics, or grand theories of mathematics are examined for their ethical implications. What are the ramifications of these thoughts for human existence? With such an attitude, it feels like the vmPFC is, more or less, always working. This serves as a distinction with analytic philosophers who pride themselves on dispassionate, though frequently meaningless, analysis of argumentative structure and definitions.

Conservatives, by and large, are religious, better looking, have children in larger numbers, have them in the context of marriage, and are mentally and physically healthier. Religious belief coupled with church attendance is correlated with a longer life and more friends than atheists or non-churchgoers. Worship, rituals, music, and prayer are all employed to remind us that we do not live by bread alone, and they all appeal to this less pragmatic portion of our mind and soul.

As an extreme example of someone who does not regard life as sacred and infused with religious meaning, Les Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. By definition, he is not a conservative or religious. In Genesis, God creates the world and declares it good. He does not say, “Once all the humans are removed.” “Neuroticism” is feeling negative feelings strongly. One can also guess that Mr. Knight is an unhappy, neurotic individual. Imagine meeting him at a party? “So, what do you do for a living?” “I campaign for your non-existence and all those you love.” Finding bizarre members of a group and pretending they represent the whole is called “nut-picking,” a version of cherry-picking your evidence. Nutty people exist. What else is new? What is significant about Les Knight is that both The Guardian and The New York Times have recently featured him prominently and with apparent approval.

Both newspapers are intensely politicized and overtly favor whatever the global elite are pushing at any given moment. Moreover, they do not provide forums for people they despise or disapprove of; Donald Trump is the prime example. Even having an Op-Ed where senator Tom Cotton suggested that the military should be brought in to help quell the extreme violence and intimidation of Antifa and some members of BLM during the summer of “mostly peaceful protests” was met with such an extremely negative reaction from junior journalists at the paper, that the person responsible for permitting it was forced to resign. So, publication in those newspapers without an accompanying strident condemnation expresses sympathy. The elite, apparently, are comfortable with someone promoting the extinction of the entire human race. The sooner, the better, presumably. Such an attitude can be contrasted with that same elite’s negative reaction to, say, a mass shooter.

By contrast, only a handful of people are killed, albeit involuntarily. It becomes a pretext to push gun control, using the dead as a means to this political end. Yes, the misanthropic abolition of man is supposed to be voluntary, according to Knight, but Mr. Knight has no love for man. In fact, he wants our termination. It would spell the end of anti-white hatred. It would be anti-species hatred. Finally, inclusion for all! My friend Thomas F. Bertonneau used to jokingly wear a Cthulu t-shirt saying, “No Lives Matter.” The fact that those who regard themselves as our moral superiors, The New York Times and The Guardian, are happy to promote this point of view, gives support to those of us who view the current elite as incompetent and, most of all, pathological. Some think that not only are there demonic forces at work in the world but that actual demons are afoot. One can see why.

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