The Value of Pointlessness

and the Pilgrim on the Lord's Prayer

Mentioned Below:
G.K. Chesterton, Stories, Essays, & Poems
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
The Way of a Pilgrim
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Two Ways of Being in the World

Iain McGilchrist suggests that there are two ways of being in the world, both of which are essential (though one is ultimately in the service of the other):

One (is) to allow things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence, and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world, we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of the whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective. The other (is) to step outside the flow of experience and ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicit, abstracted, compartmentalised, fragmented, static (though its ‘bits’ can be set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p.92

The first way of being in the world is associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. And that right hemispheric way of being in the world is essentially the point. The left hemispheric way of being in the world (standing at a distance from the world, breaking it up into bits so that it can be clarified and manipulated) is very useful (in fact essential in many circumstances) but it is meant to serve the overall picture of the world and our connectedness to it that is the purpose of the right hemisphere.

This is why McGilchrist’s book is called The Master and His Emissary. The master is the right hemisphere and the emissary the left. The emissary is “sent out”, as it were, into the world in order to glean information about it and “report back” to the right hemisphere which in turn feeds that information or insight back into the bigger picture. McGilchrist’s argument is, though, that in Western Modernity the emissary has betrayed the master, putting on its master’s mantle and pretending to be the one who sent it.

What this means is that we have, in the West, mostly picked up a left-hemispheric way of being in the world. At one level, this means that we instinctively value utility. A question like, “What’s the point of that?” makes sense to us. By it, we mean that there is no utility of such-and-such a thing and therefore it is not worthy of our attention.