Let ‘The West’ Die

Current arguments about the state of “the West” usually begin with disputes about what it actually is, and the answer you receive to that question will depend on whom you talk to. For liberals, the West is usually the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed—parliamentary democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom of speech. For conservatives, it might signal a set of cultural values such as traditional attitudes to family life, religion and national identity, and probably broad support for capitalist economics. For the kinds of post-modern leftists who have dominated the culture for some time now, the West—assuming they will concede that it even exists—is largely a front for colonization, empire, racism, and various other historical horrors.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, or empire. The West, in fact, is at the same time a simpler, more ancient, and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.

In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War II, the medieval historian Christopher Dawson explained it like this:

There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.

Your personal attitude to that “living faith” is beside the point here. So, come to that, is the entirely legitimate question of whether “Christendom” was even Christian much of the time. People will be arguing about all of that forever. The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies, then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: Everything will be up for grabs.

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is dangerous.

The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine: of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money. And it is because this gaze has been unable for centuries to appreciate that world in its fullness that we have come so unstuck. If we are going to get stuck again, as it were, we will need to learn to see the world very differently.

The man to help us is Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and philosopher who is probably best known for his book The Master and His Emissary. Here he draws on neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate that the Western mind is, indeed, strange and unique. McGilchrist has recently followed this up with The Matter with Things, a vast two-volume work that builds his case with reams of evidence and arguments drawn from brain science and philosophy.

To McGilchrist, the Western way of seeing—a way of seeing that was always going to give birth to something like the Machine—is rooted in the brain itself, and our very particular way of relating to the world can be seen, from some angles, as almost a form of mental illness. Our minds are, he suggests, unable to see the world in its fullness because our culture has trained them—or been trained by them—to see the world as an object and not a living thing. The consequence—in my words, not his—has been the emergence of the Machine and its values.

McGilchrist’s thesis is ultimately about brain hemispheres. All animal brains are divided into two halves, joined by a thin band of connecting tissue, and nobody quite knows why. What they do know, according to McGilchrist, is that each hemisphere has its own particular way of seeing—or, as he puts it, way of “attending to the world.” This does not break down according to the popular stereotype in which the “left brain” is masculine, scientific, rational, and cold and the “right brain” is feminine, intuitive, artistic, and warm. Rather, according to McGilchrist, “the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it.”

The left and right hemispheres seem to have very specific ways of relating to their world. The left’s way is the way of certainty, manipulation, detail, the local and familiar, the isolated, discrete, and fragmentary. Its world is fixed, decontextualized, inanimate, general, and optimistic. The right, on the other hand, sees the whole picture, notices the peripheries, and is comfortable with the new, ambiguous, circumspect, and complex. It attends to change, flow, context, the animate, narratives, the pragmatic, empathy, and emotional expressivity, and it tends towards pessimism.

It should be clear enough that a full human life—and a working human brain—needs to encompass both of these ways of seeing, and this is indeed what the human brain is designed to do. Ideally the brain should, in McGilchrist’s thinking, exist in a particular balance, with the left hemisphere, which sees the parts, in service to the right, which sees the whole. This is how most societies—and hence minds—in the past appear to have functioned, including that of the pre-modern West.

But something happened, posits McGilchrist, over the course of Western history. In this little part of the world, there was a revolution. At some point, or perhaps at many points, the left hemisphere—the emissary—overthrew the right—the master—and began to run the show itself. Instead of the parts being in service to the whole, the whole became diminished or dismissed by a perspective that could only see the world as a collection of parts. The result is the Machine mind, and the irony is “that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.”

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that “we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it.” There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as “romantics,” “nostalgics,” “reactionaries,”or “dreamers.” The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. “We exist in the world, of course,” he writes, “but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance.”

Our current age, the age of A.I., the metaverse, and the deepening technosphere, is not simply the product of how we see the world; these technologies both emerge from and accelerate the process of distortion. We are losing contact with reality altogether even as we imagine that we are “progressing” towards it. “Machines and tools,” McGilchrist says, “are alone coded in the left hemisphere.” It is the left hemisphere that built Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley that built us. He believes that “we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case.” Now, as a result, “we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think about the world and what we make of ourselves.”

In short, “the West” as we know it today is an overwhelmingly left-hemisphere culture, and this descent into a narrow way of seeing has been accelerating as modernity has progressed. At one point, McGilchrist even makes the startling claim that Western art from the Modernist period onward often looks like the kind of representation of the world that is produced by people who have suffered brain damage to the right hemisphere. He is neither being insulting nor speaking metaphorically. Are we in “the West” literally a culture with brain damage? It would explain a lot.

How many of us have spent our lives struggling to escape from the burdens placed upon us by our modern minds? I know I have. I feel like a boy born with a largely right-hemisphere sensibility who spent the first half of his life having it drummed out of him by a left-hemisphere culture and the second half trying to claw some of it back. The clawing is ongoing. For this reason, McGilchrist’s work has always intrigued and excited me. In some ways, it seems like the kind of project that only modernity could conceive: It is, in essence, the use of the Machine’s tools to challenge the Machine’s dominance. Deep discussions about the science of brain hemispheres are, in the end, an attempt to provide the kind of “evidence” that a Machine culture needs to justify a critique of Machine culture. At the end of it all, though, the conclusion is the same: Western modernity is culturally and spiritually ill. Our way of seeing is deeply unbalanced, and it is wrecking our culture and our world.

This left-hemisphere culture is what today we call “the West,” and the whole of this “West,” since at least the eighteenth century and possibly much earlier, has been in a state of permanent revolution. Was this forged by that left-hemisphere way of seeing, or was it the other way around? Who knows, but from France to Russia, Germany to America, Marx to Rand, 1789 to 1969, the aim has been the same: Bring it all down. Break it all up. Pull it apart, examine the parts, put them back together in a better, more equal, more profitable, more human order. This is the left hemisphere’s way of relating to the world. In the words of Ezra Pound, Modernist poet turned fascist propagandist (the distance between those stances was always very small), the modern West has always had one purpose: Make it new, make it new.

Dawson understood the West’s revolutionary desire to remake the world as, at root, a religious impulse, one that set it apart from all other cultures. The West, he wrote, is “different from all other civilizations because its religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and change the world.” While the other great cultures of the world “realized their synthesis between religion and life and then maintained their Sacred Order,” in the West “the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal.”

This is what we do, here in “the West”: We break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests. We split atoms and bust through the upper atmosphere. We break the bounds between species and sexes; we blur the lines between life and death. Our great revolution has unleashed untold energy and created miracles, but now we can see where it is going. The modern revolution, the Machine revolution, is the left hemisphere’s work. There is a kind of greatness to it, and a certain tragedy. Most of today’s “defenders of the West” are defending aspects of this revolution. They will defend empire, science, rationality, progress, and nuclear fission until the cows come home. They are revolutionaries themselves, even if they call themselves conservatives. But the West’s left-brain revolution will end up destroying us, and the world, if we let it.

So if you ask me to help “defend the West” now, I will reply that, though this place is my home and the home of my ancestors, I can’t avoid the reality that the modern “West” birthed the Machine, and is building that inhuman future. Something in our way of seeing contained a seed that unmade the world. Do I want that seed to grow? No. I want to uproot it. I want to say that this “West” is not a thing to be “conserved”: not now. It is a thing to be superseded. It is an albatross around our necks. It obstructs our vision. It weighs us down.

Sometimes, you have to know when to let go.

“The West” has become an idol, some kind of static image of a past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: the Machine. “The West” today thinks in numbers and words, but can’t write poetry to save its life. “The West” is the kingdom of Mammon. “The West” eats the world, and eats itself, that it may continue to “grow.” “The West” knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. “The West” is exhausted and empty.

Maybe, then, just maybe, we need to let “the West” die. Let it die so that we can live. Maybe we need to let this concept fall away. To let it crumble so that we can see what lies beneath. Stop all the “fighting” to preserve something that nobody can even define, something that has long ago lost its heart and soul. Stop clinging to the side of the sinking hull as the band plays on. We struck the iceberg long ago; it must be time, at last, to stop clinging to the shifting metal. To let go and begin swimming, out towards the place where the light plays on the water. Just out there. Do you see? Beyond; just beyond. There is something waiting out there, but you have to strike out to reach it. You have to let go.

Forget, then, about “defending the West.” Think instead about rebuilding a real human culture, from the roots. If we have gone down a blind alley, then we need to back up, to turn around and discover where we went wrong. We need a counter-revolution: a restoration. We need to overthrow the emissary and put the real master back in his place. If we are attending to the world wrongly—if our way of seeing is up the spout—well, then we are going to have to start seeing differently. But first we have to try and unmoor ourselves from this one.

Where would we start?

McGilchrist would tell us that we should start by changing our quality of attention. This may sound nebulous, but it is anything but. If our left-hemisphere-dominated minds cause us to pay attention to the world in one way, then we need to train them, bit by bit, to pay attention in another. “Attention changes the world,” he writes. “How you attend to it changes what it is you find there.”

What would this mean in practice? I think we know already. It would mean attending to the ways of seeing that were central to past cultures, but that Western modernity relentlessly dismisses or downplays as unprofitable, unrealistic, romantic, and all the rest. Perhaps central to this is an effort to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism, and then to express it that way, through art, through creativity, through writing, through our conversations. The last part is the hardest, very often, but maybe the most important too. If we refuse to see the world or its inhabitants as machines, if we are suspicious of rationalizations and dogmatic insistence and easy answers and false divisions, even for a moment, then we are making a start.

This is in effect a rebellion against a whole way of seeing, but that rebellion is also well established by now. I think that, at some unconscious level, we want to win it. Emotional, cultural, and spiritual resistance to the Machine has been going on for centuries, and the need for it only grows more urgent. We can take part by going outside and praying beneath the moon, or just sitting in the grass and really experiencing the rain. We can seek to be reasonable rather than rational, and to distinguish intelligence from wisdom.

Once you try to view the world through McGilchrist’s hemispheric understanding of culture, you will probably find that it looks quite different. Look at the world of politics, for example, and you’ll soon notice that both “left” and “right” are, in McGilchrist’s hemispheric terms, both very much on the left. Compare a modern skyscraper and an old cottage, or a Byzantine icon and a Picasso. Or consider contemporary language compared to its older equivalent: nature versus biodiversity, mothers versus chestfeeders, people versus human resources. Consider countries, religions, stories, communities, or families from both right- and left-hemisphere viewpoints. How do they look? How do they feel? Like complex, delicate networks of relationship—or like mechanisms to be deconstructed and rebuilt at will?

The attempt to live without the rest of nature, to conquer the world, to rationalize and remake it from the top down and bottom up: This began here, in “the West.” So here’s a thought: The alternative needs to come from here too. We started the revolution, so we need to start the restoration. We understand the Machine better than anyone, because it’s in us. We unmade the world. Now we are going to have to remake it again.

We Western people have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbors. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no “culture” which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Beyond “the West” there might just be another way of seeing. An older way. Beyond the West, we might find Europe. We might find Albion. We might find Cockayne, or Doggerland. We might find the mind that painted the cave walls. We might find hunters and clear rivers and countries and saints and spirits and painted churches. We might find shrines and pilgrim routes and folk music and fear of the sea. We might find ourselves again.

This essay is adapted from Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025).