I'm walking out on a limb here. I wonder if our modern tendency to specialize ultimately means that the left hemisphere is not just more in control, but also is a determining factor in our social relations. Based on Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin's book The Neo-Generalist, my perception (BTW, I'm one of the neo-generalists that they write about in the book.) is that people who are generalists are more right brain. I certainly am. My perception of the world is broad and highly integrated. I wonder about this.
Nov 13, 2022·edited Dec 19, 2022Liked by Gary Sharpe
Hi again Gary,
Somewhere here in the reading or comments, I followed up on one of your links to McGilchest's latest post 'Can we unmake the world we have made?'. Just thought I'd share my comments to his podcast here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
''Got the heads up about this from Gary Sharpe's substack.
At about :30, I just about clapped on hearing who I now call Steven 'Pangloss' Pinker being called out for his bubble-gated-community vision of the world.
Living in Japan for 40 years (applied linguist, though my undergrad was in biology), among the information I've read about the birth of the modern Japanese Corporate Nation-State is how Victorian-era (Meiji-era) industrialists were sucking the lifeblood from long sustainable rural communities by enticing the youth into coming to the large-scale, industrial cities for 'success'. What the ambitious sociopathic industrialists did not know or care about is that the nurturing and sustaining culture of small communities is a naturally emergent quality from humans as 'social' primates (maybe Dunbar's number or less) ... not 'herded' primates.
The top-down, imposed, and patronizing 'faux-communities' of the Japanese factory 'towns' were, and are not now, nurturing and sustainable ... hence one corporate scandal after another, with the same, predictable promise of 'structural reform', made by those same sociopaths. I grew up in semi-rural North Carolina, where my dad's family came from a similar cotton mill town, and saw some of the same dysfunctions of anomie. In contrast, while doing some volunteer-educational work in rural Cambodia, though the villagers were 'poor' by consumer standards, I've never felt more at home or had such good times.
1:25 ... Am I a fan of of civilization? Maybe. This is a catch-all conversational term, and if one tries to pin down a definition of the word among 100 people, you will eventually get a hundred qualitatively different meanings. Parsing the difference between 'culture' and 'civilization' alone is worthy of a book or three. Stealing from the logical positivists ... the clarification of a proposition is its verification. I suspect going down the rabbit hole of defining these broad terms will be an 'all roads lead to Rome' thingy.
(Western) civilization as The source of 'justice, liberty, and equality'? Hmm ... I don't know. Here, I am drawing on primatologist Frans de Waal as one counterargument. His TED talk alone, is a hilarious but perceptive argument that there are quite a few other social animals, including some non-mammalian (crows) who have a pretty good grasp of 'equality' and 'justice'. 'Liberty' might not be at the same level of abstraction because other than human intervention, I see nothing imposing on an animal's natural liberty.
2:40 ... A wonderful educational system? Hmm. Again, 40 years in Japan, and I wonder. Some years back, while I was an Associate Prof. of English Communication at Jissen Women's College, I took several open courses at rival (and more highly ranked) Sagami Women's College, one of which was the history of public education in Japan. It was taught by a prof. who had also worked for MEXT (the central Ministry of Education) and I had also worked a few years as one of two native speakers of English in the country as a cultural advisor and textbook editor. The prof. and I had brief exchanges after class, one of which was the factoid of how the public education system in Japan was pretty much a copy-paste of the structure and heuristics of public education in Victorian England ... which shared the organizational structure and heuristics of two other institutions at the time — the military and the penal system. Charles Dickens, other than Shakespeare, arguably the 2nd most influential writer in the English language, had a lot to say about that.
I am now working as an Assistant Language Teacher for a small township in West Tokyo, and not much has changed. Despite having conducted, published, and presented my own research in an Event-Driven Curriculum — drawing on what I had learned in teaching and grad school about the importance of group dynamics, realia, intrinsic motivation, immediacy and involvement, humanistics and values clarification, Total Physical Response, game theory, jazz chants, etc. — the default structure and heuristics of the school system is pretty much what I have come to term 'Chain of Command'. And as the town I work for is Kunitachi, I am pretty much at the bottom of the COCK. 🤣
3:40 ... EXCELLENT educational technique, and one I had occasionally used while teaching Public Speaking at Temple University Japan. Just last week, I attended a demonstration class at one of the Jr. Highs I work at, and a peer review-discussion in which three head English teachers at the three Jr. Highs, and several elementary school teachers attended, maybe 50 or so attendees. The keynote speaker was a Japanese prof. a bit younger than myself who is an English as a Foreign Language specialist, and he presented three main themes that the Ministry of Education was pushing ... though I suspect only a portion of his talk can pass through the 'great filter' the public school teachers' own self-awareness.
Those three areas he spoke about include 1) English as a communicative tool as opposed to a sorting tool on standardized tests, 2) the value of 'realia' (material meant to interest native speakers, but simplified for the language classroom) for motivation, and 3) the capacity and willingness to communicate with a high tolerance of ambiguity ('aimai' in Japanese). That last one requires negotiating skills that few Japanese teachers are willing to exercise with either myself or their students because 'Chain of Command' is so much easier for them, and the teachers are not held accountable for unsuccessful learning outcomes. I don't think things have changed in the last 150 years, and technology is only going to augment a top-down Chain of Command. This is not necessarily due to a character fault by the teachers, but the Ministry of Education imposes so much demands of time and energy by the teachers, Chain of Command is the only way to react, and still have time for themselves and their own families. I think this is by malicious design.
4:15 ... Age of Puritanism. Another EXCELLENT summary of Chain of Command. Just a few days ago, one day after the demonstration class and discussion, I had some students exercise negotiation of meaning through playing a simple joke on them. They were interviewing me with simple questions to practice changing pronouns, and included the question ... 'What animal do you like?' I gave them a straight faced answer of 'Spicy Chicken. Sometimes pork cutlets, or Kobe beef.' At the very least, after some initial confusion and laughter, 'living' and 'wild' are now part of their vocabulary.
But there are some teachers I work with who will absolutely not tolerate such 'nonsense' and accuse me of subverting a textbook exercise. If it is not in the book and on schedule, it is not permitted. So among the pedagogic tools I noticed 'Chain of Command' will not tolerate includes, humor, individuation, music, ambiguity, error, or even 'communicative activities'. The Japanese public education system has always promoted compliance to authority as its highest value. No wonder most Japanese will not become 'affectively' communicative even in their own language (look at plummeting marriage rates), much less a foreign tongue. The result of Chain of Command on the workforce? Rather than whole-hearted compliance, what emerges is a culture of 'Quiet Quitting' and the closely related 'Quiet Hiring' and 'Quiet Firing' ... all behind a kabuki-show facade of meritocracy.
5:30 ... Loss of vitality. Yes. I also teach at 8 elementary schools in Kunitachi, and one school for students with special needs. The 5th and 6th graders at elementary schools (roughly between 10 and 12 years old), still exercise a wild and free joy to communicate with me before, during, and after class. But by the time they finish 3 years of Jr. High 'juken senso' (exam wars), most spontaneity and curiosity they once had has been drilled out of them. Socialization has become conflated with institutionalization. My guess is this is both by design and the human psychological default of dependent and infantilized 'adults'. What those at the top of the corporate nation state have always wanted is compliant and disposable human capital. Anyone more educated than that, and not part of the ruling class, is a threat to the status quo.
6:00 ... Yep. Technology is no better than our capacity to use it. Do a Google search for 'Asian Century Institute — Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities'. It links to a longer Bloomberg article, but other searches on the net with similar key words can come up with similar opinion pieces on the gist of the former Prime Minister Abe's mandate in 2015 — ''Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law.'' Without these generalists, we are fully dependent on politically ambitious micro-managers and their questionable conflicts of interest. Malicious design.
Excellent short video clip!
This passes my beer test ... yeah, I'd love to chat over a beer or three with Dr. McGilchrist.
What an enlightening article I have recently discovered McGilchrist’s book “The Master and His Emissary” and I love how you used this knowledge to intertwine with Dr Joaquin Farias, Bonnie Badenoch and Porges, definitely a right brain function, creating a whole picture. It explains a lot about what happened in the last 2 years with people under stress, trauma and fear losing empathy and compassion. Also might explain some of the increase in non covid illness we are now seeing.
I'm curious how you think this information can be actioned against? I can't feel the hemispheres of my brain separately, nor do I know how to address any dysfunction that might be occurring with one of them. So how can I use this information to my advantage or improved functionality?
I'm walking out on a limb here. I wonder if our modern tendency to specialize ultimately means that the left hemisphere is not just more in control, but also is a determining factor in our social relations. Based on Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin's book The Neo-Generalist, my perception (BTW, I'm one of the neo-generalists that they write about in the book.) is that people who are generalists are more right brain. I certainly am. My perception of the world is broad and highly integrated. I wonder about this.
Hi again Gary,
Somewhere here in the reading or comments, I followed up on one of your links to McGilchest's latest post 'Can we unmake the world we have made?'. Just thought I'd share my comments to his podcast here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
''Got the heads up about this from Gary Sharpe's substack.
At about :30, I just about clapped on hearing who I now call Steven 'Pangloss' Pinker being called out for his bubble-gated-community vision of the world.
Living in Japan for 40 years (applied linguist, though my undergrad was in biology), among the information I've read about the birth of the modern Japanese Corporate Nation-State is how Victorian-era (Meiji-era) industrialists were sucking the lifeblood from long sustainable rural communities by enticing the youth into coming to the large-scale, industrial cities for 'success'. What the ambitious sociopathic industrialists did not know or care about is that the nurturing and sustaining culture of small communities is a naturally emergent quality from humans as 'social' primates (maybe Dunbar's number or less) ... not 'herded' primates.
The top-down, imposed, and patronizing 'faux-communities' of the Japanese factory 'towns' were, and are not now, nurturing and sustainable ... hence one corporate scandal after another, with the same, predictable promise of 'structural reform', made by those same sociopaths. I grew up in semi-rural North Carolina, where my dad's family came from a similar cotton mill town, and saw some of the same dysfunctions of anomie. In contrast, while doing some volunteer-educational work in rural Cambodia, though the villagers were 'poor' by consumer standards, I've never felt more at home or had such good times.
1:25 ... Am I a fan of of civilization? Maybe. This is a catch-all conversational term, and if one tries to pin down a definition of the word among 100 people, you will eventually get a hundred qualitatively different meanings. Parsing the difference between 'culture' and 'civilization' alone is worthy of a book or three. Stealing from the logical positivists ... the clarification of a proposition is its verification. I suspect going down the rabbit hole of defining these broad terms will be an 'all roads lead to Rome' thingy.
(Western) civilization as The source of 'justice, liberty, and equality'? Hmm ... I don't know. Here, I am drawing on primatologist Frans de Waal as one counterargument. His TED talk alone, is a hilarious but perceptive argument that there are quite a few other social animals, including some non-mammalian (crows) who have a pretty good grasp of 'equality' and 'justice'. 'Liberty' might not be at the same level of abstraction because other than human intervention, I see nothing imposing on an animal's natural liberty.
2:40 ... A wonderful educational system? Hmm. Again, 40 years in Japan, and I wonder. Some years back, while I was an Associate Prof. of English Communication at Jissen Women's College, I took several open courses at rival (and more highly ranked) Sagami Women's College, one of which was the history of public education in Japan. It was taught by a prof. who had also worked for MEXT (the central Ministry of Education) and I had also worked a few years as one of two native speakers of English in the country as a cultural advisor and textbook editor. The prof. and I had brief exchanges after class, one of which was the factoid of how the public education system in Japan was pretty much a copy-paste of the structure and heuristics of public education in Victorian England ... which shared the organizational structure and heuristics of two other institutions at the time — the military and the penal system. Charles Dickens, other than Shakespeare, arguably the 2nd most influential writer in the English language, had a lot to say about that.
I am now working as an Assistant Language Teacher for a small township in West Tokyo, and not much has changed. Despite having conducted, published, and presented my own research in an Event-Driven Curriculum — drawing on what I had learned in teaching and grad school about the importance of group dynamics, realia, intrinsic motivation, immediacy and involvement, humanistics and values clarification, Total Physical Response, game theory, jazz chants, etc. — the default structure and heuristics of the school system is pretty much what I have come to term 'Chain of Command'. And as the town I work for is Kunitachi, I am pretty much at the bottom of the COCK. 🤣
3:40 ... EXCELLENT educational technique, and one I had occasionally used while teaching Public Speaking at Temple University Japan. Just last week, I attended a demonstration class at one of the Jr. Highs I work at, and a peer review-discussion in which three head English teachers at the three Jr. Highs, and several elementary school teachers attended, maybe 50 or so attendees. The keynote speaker was a Japanese prof. a bit younger than myself who is an English as a Foreign Language specialist, and he presented three main themes that the Ministry of Education was pushing ... though I suspect only a portion of his talk can pass through the 'great filter' the public school teachers' own self-awareness.
Those three areas he spoke about include 1) English as a communicative tool as opposed to a sorting tool on standardized tests, 2) the value of 'realia' (material meant to interest native speakers, but simplified for the language classroom) for motivation, and 3) the capacity and willingness to communicate with a high tolerance of ambiguity ('aimai' in Japanese). That last one requires negotiating skills that few Japanese teachers are willing to exercise with either myself or their students because 'Chain of Command' is so much easier for them, and the teachers are not held accountable for unsuccessful learning outcomes. I don't think things have changed in the last 150 years, and technology is only going to augment a top-down Chain of Command. This is not necessarily due to a character fault by the teachers, but the Ministry of Education imposes so much demands of time and energy by the teachers, Chain of Command is the only way to react, and still have time for themselves and their own families. I think this is by malicious design.
4:15 ... Age of Puritanism. Another EXCELLENT summary of Chain of Command. Just a few days ago, one day after the demonstration class and discussion, I had some students exercise negotiation of meaning through playing a simple joke on them. They were interviewing me with simple questions to practice changing pronouns, and included the question ... 'What animal do you like?' I gave them a straight faced answer of 'Spicy Chicken. Sometimes pork cutlets, or Kobe beef.' At the very least, after some initial confusion and laughter, 'living' and 'wild' are now part of their vocabulary.
But there are some teachers I work with who will absolutely not tolerate such 'nonsense' and accuse me of subverting a textbook exercise. If it is not in the book and on schedule, it is not permitted. So among the pedagogic tools I noticed 'Chain of Command' will not tolerate includes, humor, individuation, music, ambiguity, error, or even 'communicative activities'. The Japanese public education system has always promoted compliance to authority as its highest value. No wonder most Japanese will not become 'affectively' communicative even in their own language (look at plummeting marriage rates), much less a foreign tongue. The result of Chain of Command on the workforce? Rather than whole-hearted compliance, what emerges is a culture of 'Quiet Quitting' and the closely related 'Quiet Hiring' and 'Quiet Firing' ... all behind a kabuki-show facade of meritocracy.
5:30 ... Loss of vitality. Yes. I also teach at 8 elementary schools in Kunitachi, and one school for students with special needs. The 5th and 6th graders at elementary schools (roughly between 10 and 12 years old), still exercise a wild and free joy to communicate with me before, during, and after class. But by the time they finish 3 years of Jr. High 'juken senso' (exam wars), most spontaneity and curiosity they once had has been drilled out of them. Socialization has become conflated with institutionalization. My guess is this is both by design and the human psychological default of dependent and infantilized 'adults'. What those at the top of the corporate nation state have always wanted is compliant and disposable human capital. Anyone more educated than that, and not part of the ruling class, is a threat to the status quo.
6:00 ... Yep. Technology is no better than our capacity to use it. Do a Google search for 'Asian Century Institute — Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities'. It links to a longer Bloomberg article, but other searches on the net with similar key words can come up with similar opinion pieces on the gist of the former Prime Minister Abe's mandate in 2015 — ''Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law.'' Without these generalists, we are fully dependent on politically ambitious micro-managers and their questionable conflicts of interest. Malicious design.
Excellent short video clip!
This passes my beer test ... yeah, I'd love to chat over a beer or three with Dr. McGilchrist.
Upvoted, followed, notifications turned on.''
What an enlightening article I have recently discovered McGilchrist’s book “The Master and His Emissary” and I love how you used this knowledge to intertwine with Dr Joaquin Farias, Bonnie Badenoch and Porges, definitely a right brain function, creating a whole picture. It explains a lot about what happened in the last 2 years with people under stress, trauma and fear losing empathy and compassion. Also might explain some of the increase in non covid illness we are now seeing.
I'm curious how you think this information can be actioned against? I can't feel the hemispheres of my brain separately, nor do I know how to address any dysfunction that might be occurring with one of them. So how can I use this information to my advantage or improved functionality?