’Belonging’
comes from the same Old English word langian which forms the root of ‘longing’.
It means a sense of powerful emotional attachment to ‘my place’, where I am ‘at
home’, and implies a sense of permanence.
In the last hundred years this has
come increasingly under attack from at least three of the defining features of
modernity: mobility, which ensures a permanently changing population, who do
not necessarily have any prior attachment to the place where they now find
themselves; an extreme pace of change in the physical environment, fuelled by
consumption, the need for convenience of transport, exploitation of the natural
world, the transformation of agriculture from an ancient culture into a
business, and increasing urbanisation, all of which results in the familiar
scene quickly becoming alien; and the fragmentation of social bonds within
communities, for a host of reasons, devastatingly and meticulously captured in
a work such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, leaving us feeling less and less
as if we belong anywhere.
Continuities
of space and time are related: the loss of sense of place threatens identity,
whether personal, or cultural, over time – the sense of a place not just where
we were born and will die, but where our forefathers did, and our children’s
children will. Continuities of time are disrupted as the traditions that embody
them are disrupted or discarded, ways of thinking and behaving change no longer
gradually and at a pace that the culture can absorb, but radically, rapidly and
with the implicit, and at times explicit, aim of erasing the past.
The changes
that characterise modernism, the culture of modernity, then, are far deeper and
wider than their manifestation in art. They represent, I believe, a world
increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere, and increasingly antagonistic to
what the right hemisphere might afford.
In his
account of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, Toulmin sees a
relationship between social, religious and political conflict, on the one hand,
and the hungering for certainty that was exhibited in the science and
philosophy of the age. Though he makes the perhaps understandable assumption
that the first was the cause of the second, he himself cannot avoid noticing
evidence that the second was, to a greater extent, the cause of the first.
When we come
to the twentieth century, Toulmin identifies, I believe rightly, a still
greater demand for certainty:
The ideas of
‘strict rationality’ modelled on formal logic, and of a universal ‘method’ for
developing new ideas in any field of natural science, were adopted in the 1920s
and 1930s with even greater enthusiasm, and in an even more extreme form, than
had been the case in the mid-17th century … The Vienna Circle program was …
even more formal, exact, and rigorous than those of Descartes or Leibniz. Freed
from all irrelevant representation, content, and emotion, the mid20th-century
avant garde trumped the 17th-century rationalists in spades.
And here
again he makes, mutatis mutandis, the same assumption: that the demand for
certainty was a response to the unrest in Europe occasioned by Fascism and
Stalinism. I rather doubt that. For one thing the intellectual changes can be
seen well before the rise of totalitarianism.
What if Fascism and Stalinism
were facets of the same mental world as modernism, both of them expressions of
the deep structure of the left hemisphere’s world?
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided
Brain and the Making of the Western World (kindle location 10231-10264). Yale
University Press.
