All Aboard the Relationship (Relationships Series Part 1).

Why the most important things are the hardest to argue for, and how Iain McGilchrist’s work on brain hemispheres might help

I’ve just got back from some time away with The Collective, an experimental initiative of The Relationships Project. The Collective is a group of people from different sectors and industries, drawn together by a passionate commitment to the centrality of relationships for human flourishing. Members include senior people in education, the health service, policy, museums and heritage, local government and charities. And me, because obviously a writer and podcaster has a lot to add. We have in common a deep sense that what The Relationships Project calls Relationship Centred Practice (RCP) is urgently needed across all our sectors and beyond, and a desire to help accelerate understanding of it. RCP, for reasons I will outline below, is a hard thing to sum up in snappy short form, but for now you can think of it as “putting human relationships first”, both because they are a good in themselves, and because they are the best, healthiest way to meet many of our other goals.

I have learned so much about the impacts of instrumental, relationally- tone deaf ways of working alongside this group. Someone in medicine despairs of the ever more process- driven, risk-managed approach to care, and the way it dehumanises both the patient and the “provider”. They recall being told in their training: “here, you are not a person, you are a professional”. The educator knows the enormous pressures teachers are under, the ways pupils (and families) can become projects and problems to be solved, fed into the big machine of targets. In local government, amazing, community led, organic forms of neighbourhood solidarity keep springing up, but bone deep cuts mean those in power never feel able to support them, and are even part of systems working against them. It’s the same in social care, policy, in my media-adjacent world. Trying to explain to people that my podcast is as much about the relationship formed with the guest, about gifting people with influence some space for deep reflection, as it is about hitting blockbuster numbers of listeners, sounds like naive woo. Isn’t everything about the numbers, really? (*quick break while I check my substack stats*).

Advocating for the importance of relationships in an instrumentally minded world is such hard work. It is both too big, connected to everything, and too soft-sounding. In policy circles particularly, one member reports, people’s eyes glaze over. Yes, yes, we all know that we feel better when our carer remembers our name, learn better when our teacher gets to know us, feel more belonging when we work alongside our neighbours for the good of our community, but the idea of designing a world that enables those things can sound like hippie nonsense. Sure, put up a poster saying ‘Be Kind’, but also, time is money. Human relationships get coded as a “frilly extra” a nice to have, but not worth protecting in pursuit of savings and efficiency and “real”, hard, measurable goals. 

We as a collective have already seen fruit of our time together, in deeper understanding and new connections and the beginning of new initiatives, and it’s a joy to be with such smart, committed and thoughtful people. It is also, honestly, frustrating. We circle around and around questions of a) how we work together relationally in an unrelational world, and b) how to tackle the problem without just appealing to the exact incentives which are causing it. Some days it is hard to hope that there is any thing we can do to bring change, beyond modelling and advocating in our own little areas. We include idealists, who think any collaboration with existing systems (trying to justify RCP on the basis of “customer satisfaction” for example, or show the financial savings made long term when homeless people have a consistent, relational case worker) is too much of a compromise, and those pragmatists who think you just have to play the game and get in the room. There is a deep respect, but also quite a fundamental difference. In different groups, on different days, I’ve been both those people. 

Also this week, I’ve been preparing to interview Dr Iain McGilchrist on The Sacred. He had an academic career as a scholar of English, being elected to All Souls College Oxford (which I think of a sort of Hogwarts-cum-holding pen for geniuses) before retraining in medicine. He went on to become, among other things, a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, the leading mental health hospital on the UK. Have I signalled strongly enough that you can take him seriously? It is rare to find someone who is both a a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (and who has been a fellow of All Souls in two different subjects), but he is.

His thinking has been an influence on my life and work for a long time. If you’d like a good way into it, the podcast Reading our Times has two episodes which give an overview of his two mainstream books, The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things.

The key insight that is always coming back to me is that humans, in the very structure of our brains, have different types of attention. The right hemisphere pays attention broadly, is interested in how things interrelate, can hold complexity and paradox. It’s often spoken about as intuitive, imaginative, attuned to what could be, not just what is, the whole, not just the parts. The left hemispheric mode of attention is drawn to detail, categorisation, linearity and the analytic and theoretical. The left, McGilchrist argues, evolved in order to help us “get”, find food, meet immediate needs, grab stuff. The right is there to helps us “avoid getting got”, to keep us safe, to pay attention to the people around us, their well-being, the dynamics between them, the way the weather is changing and how soothing we find a song. He says “If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise”.

This is all very interesting, but the argument goes further. The title The Master and his Emissary refers to an asymmetry of the brain hemispheres. Basically, the right hemisphere is more important. The left is supposed to serve it. McGilchrist draws on his years as a doctor to demonstrate that strokes in the right hemisphere are far more destructive than strokes in the left. If you have a left hemispheric stroke stroke you may lose language and use of your right hand, but you remain tethered in reality, and are easier to rehabilitate (the right can replace a lot of those functions). A stroke in the right hemisphere, conversely, may leave you with language, detail focus and an ability to “reason” but shuts down context and relationships. It is hard to know what is real. Right hemispheric strokes are harder to recover from and far more horrifying to experience.

McGilchrist argues that because the brain is changeable or plastic, always forming new neural pathways, the form of attention we repeatedly use matters. The things we attend to, again and again, become all that we can perceive. The way we choose to attend, then, determines the way we experience the world. It makes some things visible, and some invisible. It helped me understand why conversations with atheist materialists with scientific or analytic philosophy training can get so stuck. It feels arrogant to say it, but my intuition (ha!) is that I can perceive things that they cannot, but can’t explain it in language that makes sense to them. McGilchrist believes that these disciplines are a more extreme version of a trend in wider culture which dangerously privileges left hemispheric forms of attention over right. This side lines the importance of, for example, music, art and faith. It dismisses intuitive, embodied, experiential and relational knowledge in favour of what can be dissected into parts and grasped. Describing the left hemisphere, he says “Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything.” He writes that if his thesis about the harmful dominance of left hemispheric modes of attention is true, we should expect the following:

“The left hemisphere prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would be in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world.”

These are precisely the kind of problems which The Relationships Project, and myriad others concerned with our trajectory, see clearly. In repeatedly choosing and rewarding abstract, measurable, impersonal ways of being in the world (in the name of efficiency, scale and control) we have made the servant into the master. In so doing we forgotten how to value whole swathes of our humanity.

McGilchrist’s insights have wide ranging implications. They are being taken seriously in many circles, and I’m grateful for them. But there is a paradox here. The reason he is widely read is at least partly because of the impressive, academic, scientific CV I laid out above. His books are full of brain scans, so they must be credible. One way to read his work is as a left hemispheric way of saying what feminist philosophers, black theologians, artists, and others whose intuitive, embodied, relational forms of knowledge have been sidelined, have been saying all along.

I am looking forward to asking him this fundamental question: in this world we have built, do we have to make the case for right hemispheric ways of being human in left hemispheric language? Or more directly, do we have to engage in non-relational systems in order to make the case for relationships? Are the pragmatists in The Collective (and in any group of people trying to change things) right and you have to just play the game? Or, in so doing, are we just further strengthening the pathways we want to weaken? Trying to resist intrumentalisation by instrumentalising?

I’ll report back, and I’d love to know what you think in the comments. Next week I’ll explain more about why relationships are such a deep value for me, and what I mean by that.

Photo by Vadim L on Unsplash