My take on McGilchrist in 2025 is still essentially everything I picked-up from his 2021 “The Matter With Things” with its Sacred Turn and the added interest of his much earlier 1982 “Against Criticism“. His thinking is an important, embedded part of my own story at several levels.
Since TMWT was published there was also a Channel McGilchrist forum run by people on his behalf, but I let my subscription lapse because, frankly, the interchanges didn’t seem well enough informed on Iain’s work as a whole and most people seemed to be plugging their own pet theories, with little proper dialogue. Since then apart from specific talks and interviews by Iain I’ve taken my eye of that ball.
What I hadn’t noticed (or remembered) was that Iain had started a SubStack called The Matter With Things. I’ve had a dormant SubStack since it first existed in 2021 and used to cross-post my Psyberton content there, but let that lapse too – I really have zero interest in monetizing (yuk!) my writing. Anyway, the only reason I noticed Iain had a SubStack was because today someone posted some concerns about it in Channel McGilchrist – a link that only works for paid subscribers, but here-below the intro from the notification email from Peter Barus:
‘I’m reeling after reading Iain’s recent repostings. For a fuller discussion of this, I’ve created another group, “Hannah Spier Psychobabble”. I did not comment on Iain’s substack, after reading some of the comments there, hoping for a sober conversation about what seems a shocking 180-degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part. And there’s a lot at stake, for me at least, as I’m just finishing a book that cites TMWT everywhere. Contemplating a rewrite. What the hell, it only took ten years to get to the last chapter.
As Annie Dillard wrote in “The Writer’s Life”:
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin.’
(Guessing it’s this Peter Barus – WordPress and SubStack? Interesting in itself.)
Obviously the “shocking 180 degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part” caught my eye. What the? So I did some digging:
Long story short – Iain’s been posting on his SubStack since February this year – mostly elaborations and commentaries on content / chapters from TMWT – On Sept 17th / 18th & Oct 1st he recommended and further discussed a “Psychobabble” SubStack post from Norwegian psychiatrist Hannah Spier.
So far as I can tell her post is analytical and speculative without any prescriptive conclusions, but expresses many different thoughts about motivations behind violent conflict in our perplexing time of polycrises / metacrisis. Interesting is all I would say on a first read. BUT she used the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk as an example.
Not surprisingly doing psychoanalysis in the context of a specific political lethal conflict has produced the polarised partisan political responses of our social media ecosystem. More negative heat than light – which has disappointed Iain.
I can’t for the life of me see where Iain has done a 180? Maybe the people expressing the concerns are part of that political polarisation. Anyway – just a holding post – I’ll need to do a closer read of all three posts and comment threads starting from the one linked above.
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PS – I may in due course migrate my ongoing writing to SubStack or Medium entirely – once I have a secure fixed navigable archive version of my WordPress “Psybertron” – but that’s no trivial condition, with so much invested in 25 years of blogging in WordPress, and, did I mention, so many other writing priorities.
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He hasn’t done a 180 at all… I suspect that those objecting didn’t think through all the implications of what he has always been arguing for (and, as you say, the specific hook of the Charlie Kirk murder has been very… triggering!)
I learned of this controversy during a visit to Substack. My feed offered a reaction from Matthew David Segall, a prominent panpsychist. McGilchrist had called a certain piece by Hannah Spier “brilliant,” and to some readers this was a matter for concern. Segall wrote:
“The problem I had with the Spier piece you shared is that it is profoundly one-sided and pins all the cult dynamics on progressives, painting half the country as a bunch of unreachable zealots, all the while completely ignoring the fact that it is Trump’s proto-fascist Q-anon conspiracy drunk movement that is currently in charge of every branch of government.”
McGilchrist’s point in lauding it was surely to acknowledge that progressivism can have a cultish aspect. But Spier’s approach was more simplistic:
“The cult of progressivism offers a narrative that satisfies every universal human need: belonging, purpose, significance, and transcendence. Psychologists like Arie Kruglanski and Clark McCauley have shown how radical movements follow a predictable arc: the world is corrupt, there is a clear enemy, you are part of a righteous in-group, redemption comes through struggle against the out-group and leaving carries a cost.”
This is all true, but the argument applies equally well to “the cult of conservatism,” if that is the opposite of “the cult of progressivism.” If Spier wanted to decry cults in general, that would be one thing. But her point appears to be that progressivism itself is a cult. Everything about it is bad; it is a clear danger to society. She concludes her essay, “This is not a right versus left issue. This is about progressives versus everybody else. This is about parents doing their utmost and still failing in the end because of the cult of progressivism that has infiltrated every institution surrounding us.”
I doubt there is anything in this with which Charlie Kirk would have disagreed. Yet there is much about Charlie Kirk’s conservatism with which one could disagree. Where is the balance in Spier’s article? It appears to be a full-throated exercise in exactly the kind of vilification she protests: the world is corrupt, there is a clear enemy, you are part of a righteous group, redemption comes through struggle against the out-group, and leaving carries a cost.
McGilchrist should have made clear that it needed a corrective. But when he was called out he doubled down (perhaps predictably), writing in a follow-up article that “we continue to look for totalitarianism coming from the right, whereas it may be – indeed it already is – coming from the left.” This is not wrong, but also not enough. What is “coming from the right” is also in danger of becoming totalitarian—and at the moment, it’s a good deal further along the road.
McGilchrist identifies with a non-cultish kind of conservatism. “Even to admit to being broadly ‘conservative’, in the old-fashioned sense of reasonableness, tolerance and respect for people, place, and their past, will bring down obloquy upon me.” This is sadly true. It’s important to distinguish between a moderate stance and a cultish one. But that also goes for progressivism, and McGilchrist, following Spier, is showing progressivism no such quarter. For McGilchrist also, until he clarifies his position, progressivism is the enemy; he is among the righteous; and the struggle carries a cost.
This may be a good time to point out the Heideggerian strains in McGilchrist’s own thinking. Heidegger’s philosophy is excellent in principle, but in practice, it may have led him astray. To call Spier’s piece “brilliant” is to forget or overlook the dangers inherent in her attitude. It would have been better to condemn cultism in all its forms, including the cultism of blood and soil that lurks behind communitarian ideals. We can easily paraphrase Spier: “The cult of conservatism offers a narrative that satisfies every universal human need: belonging, purpose, significance, and transcendence. ”
I doubt McGilchrist intended to “do a 180,” but his unqualified endorsement of Spier (which some have put down to a jet-lag accident) suggests that he may need to take his bearings.
Thanks AJ, thanks Sam.
I could understand the shock at (apparent) unqualified endorsement of a cultish right-wing position, rather than, as we all appear to understand, a non-cultish “conservatism” inherent in his work anyway. Spier’s position certainly used the language of the cultish position – and the example – to make the point about seeing the positive value in them, but I didn’t necessarily see her actually advocating that cultish position either. However, as I say, I’ve barely skimmed it myself, so far.
It wouldn’t be the softening that would be worrying, but the original endorsement.
I’ll read yours more closely AJ when I get a chance to dig deeper – but thanks for enlightening my mystification 🙂
Hoping Barus might also engage.
Ian