Tag Archives: McGilgrist

Miss Harbottle’s Big Mistake (And Why it Matters to Us)

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The enchanting Masterpiece series All Creatures Great and Small features a crochety but loveable Yorkshire vet, Siegfried, and his brilliant young partner, James. In this series, based on the real-life stories of James Herriot, the two vets have a policy of “putting the animal first,” that is, above profit. Yes, it’s rather scandalous — even in the 1940s — for profit to be put on the backburner in favor of living, breathing animals. But it’s not just cows and goats and dogs that come first. Their compassion for the animals’ owners require the two vets to be flexible on occasion — that is, to accept jam and eggs and the odd chicken as payment when they really need hard cash. But they do it because they not only care for the animals; they also see the fuller picture of community well-being and the need for caring for their neighbors. They live within the creative tension of compassion and making ends meet.

But of course, these beloved characters are imperfect like the rest of us, so sometimes they make the wrong call. Such was the case in Season 4, in which Siegfried, overcome with the tyranny of mounting paperwork and general office chaos, decides to hire Miss Harbottle, an uber efficient secretary, to come in and straighten up things. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?

Miss Harbottle certainly cleans up and organizes the chaos. But in the process, she begins to take control of everything, telling the doctors what they could and could not do, taking over Siegfried’s own office as her own, and generally alienating everyone with her rigid rules and domineering ways. On her first day, Miss Harbottle takes a disgusting dislike to Siegfried’s beloved pet rat, Volonel, whose cage sits next to his desk, and takes it upon herself to banish Volonel to a dark back room.

This would not stand! Siegfried returns Volonel to his proper place and even tries to muster the courage to fire Miss Harbottle. But alas, his resolve crumbles against her rigid, manipulative dominance.

One day, a man named Joe Coyne brings in his little white ferret, Wilf, who is suffering from a lump on his skin and needs surgery. Miss Harbottle turned him away for not making “a proper appointment” or paying in advance (her new policy). Joe stomped away with his ferret in tow, vowing never to return.

That act proves to be Miss Harbottle’s undoing. Because the “animals first” policy is so brutally disrespected, James and Siegfried conspire to bring Wilf in for surgery after Miss Harbottle leaves for the evening. But alas, the formidable Harbottle returns for the post she had forgotten and encounters this “unauthorized” operation in progress. Livid, she decries, “You went against my authority!” Upon which Siegfried responds, “an authority I should have never relinquished.”

Of course, Miss Harbottle is dismissed on the spot and life returns to its normal creative chaos. An entertaining story, for sure, but it also reminds us of the tensions within human nature and, on a deeper, spiritual level, reveals something of what is wrong with the world even now.

Miss Harbottle as Metaphor

Miss Harbottle is the perfect metaphor for what philosopher, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist calls “left-hemisphere dominance.”  His “hemisphere hypothesis” is that the left hemisphere of our divided brain has an important role to play in our lives, but it is a limited one that serves the broader view of the right hemisphere — like a camera zooming in to grasp, isolate, and manipulate (left-hemisphere) and then zooming out to see the larger context (right hemisphere). We need both perspectives in order to survive and thrive. The problem comes when the left hemisphere goes rogue and takes over (i.e., Miss Harbottle). When this happens, we lose perspective and life becomes mechanical, shallow, literal, fragmented, and lifelessly static.

Like Miss Harbottle, the left-hemisphere simply can’t see the whole picture, the broader context, and the relational aspects of existence. It believes it is always right, seeks to control, and gets angry when confronted (anger being the prime emotion of the left-hemisphere).

When we (individuals or whole societies) allow this part of our thinking to be our dominant view of reality, we become rigid and limited in our thinking, cut off from the real world of flesh and blood and feeling, and from the spiritual world that gives meaning and purpose. We are inviting tyranny into our lives.

McGilchrist does not reduce the mind to the physical brain as do scientific materialists, but rather sees the brain’s two hemispheres as a physical home for our consciousness. How we use our brains becomes a moral and spiritual choice. As his decades of research shows, we can open ourselves to meaning, spirituality, and beauty only when our brains are balanced, with the right hemisphere being the master and the left, the helper.

In his massive (and massively important) work The Master and His Emissary, he tells a fable which could easily be Siegfried and Miss Harbottle: a master becomes overcome with too much work to handle and hires an emissary to help. But the emissary begins to take over. In the process, life — human, animal, creation — along with compassion and an intelligent sense of the broader picture is lost in the small and narrow focus of left-hemisphere tyranny. Relations are fractured, rigidity rules, and catastrophe ensues.

Miss Harbottle’s big mistake was not her efficiency and skill, which was sorely needed, but her desire to take over with rigid rules that look good in the abstract, but fail miserably in reality. She failed to see herself as a “helper” and took control over the vet practice, leaving soured feelings and fractured relationships. She couldn’t see the larger context in which she worked — the real world of struggling country folk, suffering animals, and delicate village relationships.

When the left hemisphere overreaches its authority and does not return attention (zoom out) to the larger, living, breathing, interconnected world, bad things happen. Devoid of the right hemisphere’s larger, more intelligent and contextual view of things, farmers and ferrets become mere numbers and abstractions rather than living beings.

The sense of interconnection, flow, and all the values of the spiritual life are lost in the emissary’s grasp for power. Our openness to the Divine and to the higher values of goodness, truth, and beauty — all that makes life meaningful — depends on our choice to return our focus to the master, i.e., the right hemisphere. But how?

A is for Attention

McGilchrist emphasizes that the brain hemispheres attend to the world differently, and that, yes, we have a moral choice in the matter. Like Siegfried, the modern world has relinquished much of its power to the emissary. It appears we are stuck with the tyranny of Miss Harbottle until we have the courage to push back and make moral choices that bring our brain hemispheres into balance, opening us up to the richness and depth of love, beauty, and compassion above the rigid, narrow focus on money, power, and control. It will take a change of viewpoint — of attention — and some soul-searching to rediscover what matters.

Another way of putting it: we need to enlarge our souls for the sake of the world. The right hemisphere’s take on the world is broadening and well-rounded, while the left hemisphere lacks depth, complexity, and flexibility. So perhaps enlarging our attention is the first step to enlarging our souls. After all, “A” is for attention in the “Alphabet of Spirit Literacy.” Perhaps it is first in importance, too, or at least foundational to all the other spiritual values. If we choose to attend to the world of left-hemisphere narrowness, we will be impoverished to the point of putting our very existence in peril. The spiritual part of us needs the right hemisphere’s way of attending: seeing the whole context, the flow, and the relationality of God and the world. None of this makes sense to the rigid, literal, and abstract oriented left-hemisphere.

The Courage to Push Back

The struggle between Miss Harbottle’s narrow approach to the world and Siegfried’s attention to larger issues serves not only as a cautionary tale but an insight into our humanity and what we must regain in order to survive these perilous times. Many of our religious and spiritual values have fallen by the wayside — or been usurped by false prophets. By fattening our souls rather than our wallets, by enlarging our experiences with nature, art, and face-to-face interactions, and by broadening our minds to learn and listen to the views of the “other,” we might just regain our humanity and survive as a species. But it’s going to be an uphill battle. The Miss Harbottles of this world are a formidable lot!

But there is hope. In our story, when things fell apart in the vet practice, Siegfried had the courage to admit he was wrong in relinquishing his authority to Miss Harbottle. He was finally able to push back against the tyranny and return to his foundational values of relationships and compassion over profit and power. Yes, Siegfried had the courage to return his attention to what really matters. The question is: Do we?

The Soul-Expanding Melodies of Sadness

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“I have hymns you haven’t heard.” –Rilke

“I want to fight until I don’t feel sad anymore,” cries the young Polish character in the WWII Masterpiece series, World on Fire. The boy had just lost both his mother and his homeland in 1939. It made me wonder, is that why we fight? Do we really think it will abolish our sadness? Fighting might abolish many things, but not our sadness.

What if we could, instead, fully inhabit our sadness in bearable ways? Would it help to give us a wider view of the situation — less narrow, rigid, and vengeful– flowing outward into compassion toward all sides? Would it stop the endless cycles of violence and us-vs-them wars?

Inhabit Your Situation

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus instructed his followers to “inhabit your situation.” Everything was against this great thinker. He was a slave with a physical disability, but he inhabited his situation, and by doing so, he found peace. So, too, in times of war, climate change, injustice, horror, and unbearable loss, we must first fully inhabit — or feel — our situation before we can transform it.

Music can help. So can poetry, prayer, art, a walk in the woods, or a hug from a friend. But in this essay, I will focus on music, for music is the incarnation of pure feeling. Music is our philosopher, our spiritual teacher, our therapist, our whole-making companion in this tragic world — a world hell-bent on grasping, dehumanization, rage, and violence.

Anger, Sadness, and the Divided Brain

According to the eminent psychiatrist, brain-hemisphere scientist, and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, anger and rage are part of how the left hemisphere “attends” to the world. It sees the world in terms of us and them, black and white. It abstracts rather than connects, prefers grasping and competition rather than cooperation and compassion. It interprets the world in mechanistic terms, leaving no room for spiritual and moral qualities of the soul. The left hemisphere is supposed to be a helper to the right hemisphere by breaking things down into separate parts for study, but the parts don’t make a whole.

McGilchrist describes how the two hemispheres are supposed to work together with the metaphor of music practice:

It is like learning a piece of music: first you are drawn to play it as a whole; then you break it down into bits and practice certain passages and analyse harmonic transitions, and so on; but in the performance all that must once again be set ruthlessly aside, or the results will be disastrous.” (The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning)

But we often get stuck in the left brain, without returning our attention to the whole — and disaster, indeed, ensues. McGilchrist’s twenty-year research on stroke victims reveals that anger is the single emotion attributed to the left brain with its narrow focus, rigid certainty, manipulation, self-interest — and prime motivation: power (over others).

All this sounds suspiciously like the world we live in today (and what Jesus tried to free us from with his parables). If left-hemisphere anger cannot be processed back into the broader view of the right brain, we get stuck in loops of rage that lead to vengeance, and finally, to self-destruction. This idea begs the question: Has the left brain hijacked our world?

The right hemisphere, on the other hand, attends to the world in quite the opposite way. It is the hemisphere of a wider intelligence, flow, meaning, empathy, sadness, joy, love, creativity, spirituality, humor, music, and poetry — all that makes life worth living. And yet, these aspects of humanity play second-fiddle in our culture.

Something is terribly wrong. It appears that humanity has indeed been usurped by left-hemisphere dominance to the peril of our planet and our humanity. Even our institutions are caught up in this hijacking. Think of all the secondary schools cutting music and art programs, the stubborn dominance of scientific materialism, the entrenchment of religious fundamentalism — the damage is pervasive in our culture.

But there are signs of hope.

Music Connects

In 1999, maestro Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian literary scholar Edward W. Said created a workshop for young musicians to promote coexistence and intercultural dialogue. They named the orchestra and workshop after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s collection of poems West-Eastern Divan, a central work for the development of the concept of world culture. An equal number of Israeli and Arab musicians form the base of the ensemble, together with members from Turkey, Iran, and Spain. They meet each summer for rehearsals, followed by an international concert tour. In Daniel Barenboim’s words, “the power of music lies in its ability to speak to all aspects of the human being — the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. Music teaches us, in short, that everything is connected.”

Everything is connected. Music and the arts in general can help restore the balance of our brains — and thus open us to the harmonies of spirituality, connection, cooperation, and beauty. Music helps us reinhabit our right brain with all its promising treasures. The intonations and rhythms of music — with or without words — widens our souls and steeps us in meaning that the left hemisphere knows not of.

Perhaps if we paid compassionate attention to our own sadness with the help of music, we might find within its depths the tender melodies of connection, empathy, and hope that will become contagious.

Our First Language

Music is primal. It was our first language — the true mother tongue. Music preceded referential language in our evolutionary history and is, even now, the language of dolphins and whales and birds. Music, like poetry, helps us move from the left-brain abstractions — including dehumanizing the “other” — into a wider sense of connection to the “other.”

Music expands our souls.

When it comes to sadness, music helps us bear the unbearable. It speaks in wordless feeling, like the maternal lullabies of God — not a distant God “up there” who intervenes now and then, but a loving presence who suffers with us, even while offering us the promise of a new melody, yet to be written. This God cannot control the happenings of this world; rather, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” But God’s tender voice persistently sings to us within our suffering, luring us toward fresh possibilities with the rhythm, harmony, and intensity of music.  

Music can help us bear our despair, until it is no longer despair. Until it rises up to form something new and fresh. . . .“I have hymns you haven’t heard.”

If we can let go of our narrow left-brain grasp on rage and revenge, we might dare to enter our own sadness; and if we can fully and safely enter our own sadness, we might venture a little farther out to the sadness of others — even to the sadness of the “other.” If we have the courage to do this, we touch something divine and wholly sacred: We are choosing to share in the very suffering of God.

Hymns We Haven’t Sung

In these frightful times, we need to find more ways to sing together. But this is rare these days, except in our faith communities. Perhaps a focus on music and singing could be the road back for faith communities in decline? Forget the long, well-crafted sermon (says the preacher) and focus on music — all kinds of music! – hymns, songs, and instrumental music that nurtures feelings of openness, love, and hope. And sadness, too. To stay in the flow of process, perhaps fresh hymn lyrics of healing and inclusion can be wedded to old, familiar tunes that no longer speak to us theologically. We need hymns in minor keys, too, that touch our collective sadness in a way that brings connection and hope in our communities.

But we also need to do our individual work of inhabiting our sadness, especially if we are introverts. I suggest a music meditation with something like the intimate melodies of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes, no. 1-5, a profound work combining East/West intonations which nourish our right hemisphere of connection even as it cradles our sadness in something larger than our sadness.

For meditation practice, be sure to listen all the way through no. 5, as the last one seems to help transition the listener back to a neutral state after a deep dive into the depth of feeling. In this intimate connection to sound and feeling, you will discover a sense of cosmic companionship; that is, your sadness is cradled in something larger than yourself — the divine “fellow-sufferer, who understands” (Whitehead). The hidden melodies inside the sadness will sing to you of hope and transformation.  

For the truth is, if you have the capacity for empathy, you will be sad, especially in times like these. But once you fully inhabit your sadness, you will see that there is more than simply sadness. Sadness has other close friends like compassion, joy, hilarity, beauty, and hope.

Inhabiting your sadness through music will nourish your right brain, widen your soul, and help you develop the ability to transform anger into compassionate action rather than fighting and vengeance. Music connects us not only to one another, but to the “other,” and to the deeper divine melodies of hope and possibility. 

Finally, look for novelty in the way you feel. One comment under this particular video (below) states: “When I heard Gnossienne no. 1 for the first time, I basically unlocked a new emotion/feeling.”

Oh, yes, there are hymns we have not heard!  Are you listening?

**This essay was first published on Spirituality and Practice, October 22, 2023