Friday, August 1, 2025

"the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it"

"since the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them. . . . The cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it. . . ."

     Iain McGilchrist, "Preface to the new expanded edition," The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the modern world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019 [2010]), xxiii.

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