The World Is Not a Problem

My conversation with Iain McGilchrist & an invitation to a live online series in May

If the world is made of problems to be solved, then to admit you are out of solutions is to reach the end of the world. To those who get to play the grown-ups in our societies, anything is better than to make such an admission. So it falls to the rest of us, those who are willing to sound foolish, to say that the map is mistaken, the world is not a problem to be solved.

There’s an image that kept coming up as I wrote At Work in the Ruins. It’s the image of a fork in the road. Imagine you’re out for a walk and you come to a point where the path divides. The two paths will take you in quite different directions – there’s a choice to be made – and at the fork, there stands a signpost. Only the words on each arm of the signpost are the same.

When I say that I came to doubt the helpfulness of talking about climate change, it’s because the signs that read ‘taking climate change seriously’ now point in such different directions. They obscure the choice that stands in front of us. So a lot of what I’m doing in the book is to offer other ways of naming these paths, stories that might serve as maps, language that might help us see what is at stake. And as I’ve taken the book into conversation with others, I’ve been looking for the places where our maps overlap.

In the autumn, I finally read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and found there a far more developed exploration of something I’d been reaching towards when I wrote about the fallacy of approaching the world as ‘a problem to be solved’. Drawing on his knowledge of neuroscience, Iain identifies this approach with the left hemisphere of the brain, the way it experiences and seeks to act on the world. He puts this together with his deep reading of Western philosophy and literature to describe a repeated pattern in which periods of great cultural flourishing, which seem to reflect the collaboration between the capacities of the hemispheres, give way to periods in which the culture seems dominated by left-brain thinking, treating the world as a mechanism. In Iain’s view, this is where we find ourselves, at the end of such a period, as its costs and consequences come home. This is a reading of the times which resonates with much of the argument of At Work in the Ruins.

Back in February, on publication day,

Caroline Ross

and I made a journey to the Isle of Skye to visit Iain. During our stay, I sat down to record a conversation about all this. It’s taken a while to get the video edited and out there, but I hope you find it worth the wait.

In the next couple of weeks, there will be a round of video and podcast conversations to share with you. Not least, I’m looking forward to the release of the conversation I recorded earlier today with Gordon White for Rune Soup.

But it’s also time to make an invitation to any of you who want to join the conversation. Because Anna and I are going to host an online series next month for anyone who has read or is reading At Work in the Ruins and wants to dig into the themes of the book together. Our hope is to help readers make connections and find others with whom to explore the paths worth taking and the work worth doing in a time of endings.

We’ll gather weekly on Zoom for five weeks, starting on 3 and 4 May. There will be two groups, one that meets on a Wednesday evening (Swedish time) and the other on a Thursday morning.

You can watch the invitation I recorded in the video below – or head over to the school website for all the details.

Thanks for reading – and especially to those of you who are supporting my work by becoming paid subscribers to this Substack. I’m emerging from the seasonal phenomenon known to Swedes as vårtrötthet – ‘spring tiredness’ – when the light has returned, there’s finally some warmth in the sun and our bodies that have been hunched against the cold and dark all winter relax enough to feel the accumulated exhaustion. But I’m also feeling the itch to be writing again, so on the far side of this current run of videos and podcasts, I look forward to embarking on a new essay series, and I’m grateful to have this audience to share it with.

— DH