I have recently been reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled, ‘Team of Rivals’ by Doris Kearns Goodwin. What is perhaps unusual about the book as a biography is that it is almost equally about three other men, the candidates he beat for the Republican nomination for the presidential election in 1860, all of whom he invited to fill major posts in his first cabinet. Lincoln’s handling both of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery was a masterpiece in the art of the possible. He has been criticised for his lack of commitment as an abolitionist and his early prioritising of the Union over the question of slavery. What this biography reveals is his masterly handling of the divided voices of the republican party, his gradual winning over of popular opinion, his understanding of character, his skill in enabling very diverse personalities to work together, and his tremendous modesty, good humour and patient refusal ever to bear a grudge. If the key to politics is the tough process of ‘squeezing collective decisions out of multiple and competing interests and opinions’, then Lincoln carried that key. I have got as far as the moment where he leaves for the theatre on April 15th 1865; it is almost unbearable to read on.
Even more recently I have come across various reviews for a book which tries to explain why people vote for right wing parties when their best interests are usually served by the left (‘The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion’, by Jonathan Haidt). The author is a social psychologist which means that he makes rather bold claims on the basis of evolutionary theory and wide scale social analysis. His claims, however, are in some ways explanatory of Lincoln’s success, and suggest ways in which the divisions in the Anglican communion might be better understood and perhaps resolved.
His first claim is that we make decisions on the basis of our inherited intuitions and that we use reason to justify those decisions after we have made them. We rationalise what our gut tells us. Such intuitions are based on six ‘moral tastes’ – compassion, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Broadly speaking those on the left are concerned only for the first three ‘tastes’; those on the right are not unconcerned for these three but also put great emphasis on the other three, which is why the right is usually the party of tradition, patriotism and religion. Liberals care less for institutions, hierarchies, and the sacred as such things are often repressive and an obstacle to the freedom and equality of the individual. Liberals are perhaps in the minority because their values tend to be supported only by western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic groupings. Which explains why working class America tends to vote for a party that is anti abortion, homosexuality and immigration, and pro religion and the right to bear arms, even when the economic policies of that party tend not to benefit the poor. They are voting not in their own financial interests but in favour of what keeps society traditional, sacred, authoritarian and firmly boundaried.
Haidt goes further and claims that these attitudes are hotwired into our brains. Some people’s brains are less alert to threats and take particular pleasure in novelty, variety and diversity (Liberals) while others are more cautious less open, and more group orientated (Conservatives). Both groups, however, are equally sincere in wanting the best for society, but each group is wired differently in relation to what it prioritises as being the best. Until we realise this and begin to work with it, politics and perhaps religion will continue to be a slanging match between increasingly isolated tribes relying on their gut feelings, and refusing to understand each other. In such circumstances our moral instincts are expressed judgementally; being moral makes us moralistic.
Those whose gut instincts incline them to support issues of justice and equality, fail to appreciate the harm their policies are felt to be doing to the community’s sense of identity and loyalty and to corporate values. Liberals express their arguments rationally and often with a high moral tone, failing to recognise the power of emotionally engaging stories, appealing to group solidarity. They sometimes fail to see that well meaning reforms can have unintended consequences. For example multiculturalism and respect for individual group identities, damages a sense of corporate identity and leads to social division and misunderstanding. As Edmund Burke emphasised social order is hard to achieve and easy to lose. Enabling greater self expression tends to weaken the social fabric. It is hard to keep autonomy and interdependence in balance and yet for the well being of society the balance needs constantly to be checked.
Of course there is a flaw in this argument illuminating as parts of it may be. Having maintained on a Darwinian basis that our moral beliefs are inherited and intuitive, he then proceeds to use reason not to defend right or left, as his theory would imply that he must be constrained to do, but to argue from a position as it were above the fray – a higher capacity. His theory does not seem to take this into account (at least according to the reviews). He seems also to ignore the fact that we can be tempted to do something though we know it is wrong, and we can be inspired to do what is right even at the cost of our own wellbeing. We do not seem to behave in the way in which the wiring of our brains would seem to dictate. So perhaps he is arguing for a further stage in evolution, in which for the sake of a life saving sociality, we have to come out from our political and religious bunkers, overcome our moral instincts and learn the power of circumspection, reflection, and wisdom to reconcile our differences. In other words to behave more like Abraham Lincoln.
These reflections were then overtaken by a third encounter not with a book or a set of reviews but a lecture heard via Youtube given by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist who knows far more than Haidt about how the brain works. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI the shorter version with pictures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk the full lecture). McGilchrist in his book ‘The Master and His Emmissary’ produced a huge study of the work of the right and left hemispheres of the brain and its frontal lobe. In the past we have tended to attribute different parts of ourselves to the different lobes, whereas now it is clear that reason, emotion, language, imagination and reason all need both parts of the brain. This lecture summarises some of his findings. The left hemisphere it seems enables us to focus narrowly on what we have already learnt. It is where close and precise attention to detail happens. It deals with a simplified version of reality, with what is clear and manipulable, mechanical and technical. It cuts out what makes for difficulty and complexity. It enables us to exploit the world effectively. It prizes theory over experience, prefers mechanisms to living things and is convinced of its own rightness. The right hemisphere on the other hand, is less specific in its focus, more broadly vigilant without prior commitment as to what that might be directed to. Its attention is more sustained, and open, seeing things in context and alert to difference. It is the location of metaphor, of poetic and intuitive language; it is alert to individuals and their body language. It concerns itself with what is changing, evolving, interconnected and not perfectly known. For this reason it finds it hard to defend itself against the certainties of the left lobe, because it sees too much and is too alert too subtlety and complexity. The frontal lobe meanwhile is what enables us to stand back from the immediacy of experience. It enables us to process information and so outwit the person in front of us but it also enables us to empathise with that person and reflect on how they may feel.
Both in his book and his lecture McGilchrist looks at the ways in which the interaction of the left and right hemispheres may have affected western culture and it development. In some periods the two halves of the brain are kept in balance, in other periods like our own, the left hemisphere dominates. Such a society focuses on the virtual rather than the real, on technology, bureaucracy and the need for control. It is less sensitive to the difficulty and complexity of human reality and interchange. Though we always have need of analytic reason and precision of language, the left brain makes for a bad master but a good servant. Our humanity needs what is intuitive, alert and open to complexity. The left brain is rational, the right brain knows that reason cannot prove rationally that it is the best or the only way to engage with the world. We have two ways of looking at the world and they need each other even though they may find it hard to admit it.
We began with the extraordinary ability shown by Abraham Lincoln in enabling people of different outlooks to work together and reconciling them when things seemed irreconcilable. We then saw how the political and religious divisions between liberals and conservatives are brought about by their different prioritization of what our society needs to flourish. Liberals uphold what is just and equal, what enables the individual freely to realize his needs, dreams and ambitions; Conservatives put greater weight on maintaining communal loyalty, cohesiveness, trust and the desire to be part of something larger than oneself. Somehow they have to recognize each other’s values and discover ways in which they can work together. In the same way our most recent understanding of the way the brain works shows that we need to find ways of reasserting the humanly complex, the contexts in which our perceptions are made, the search for more holistic attitudes, and a hesitancy in making rapid judgments. The right and left hemispheres of the brain need rebalancing, and a renewed appreciation of what each can give and how they can work together.
There is no room here to show how these three areas of knowledge and experience relate to the church’s endless debates about women bishops, homosexuality and whatever will be the next subject to divide us, but I hope enough has been said to show how the church must learn to behave not only for its own sake but for the sake of society. Perhaps those whose responsibility it is to find a new archbishop should read the biography of Abraham Lincoln.