Dr. McGilchrist, Allow Me to Introduce Dr. Voegelin
Been waiting for this since 1952
Woke up Saturday morning, wishing I’d stopped one drink sooner on Friday, and hazed through the digital wasteland.
I stumbled on Iain McGilchrist posting excerpts from dusty letters by Sir Richard Clough, a 16th-century Elizabethan fixer in Antwerp. Clough was tattling to his boss, Sir Thomas Gresham, about the Puritan wrecking crew that tore through Antwerp in August 1566, smashing altars, torching beauty, and desecrating anything that didn’t bow to their grim, literalist dogma.
Puritans. Freakin’ Puritans. The OG cultural bulldozers.
I’ve been hollering about these joyless bastards for years. They’re the patron saints of the modern mind—rigid, self-righteous, and allergic to nuance.
Eric Voegelin, that Viennese sage, nailed them in The New Science of Politics (1952), painting them as the poster children of gnosticism, a mental rot that’s been afflicting Western civilization for millennia. Puritanism is a clearer portrait of this mind-sickness than a wino passed out in a gutter is of alcoholism.
Voegelin’s the real deal, a heavyweight from that fin de siècle Viennese intellectual crucible that spat out Menger, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Mises, a scene that produced more world-class thinkers than Swinging London produced groovy mods in the 1960s.
Voegelin’s New Science hit pretty big, at least as far as nerd literature goes. It even landed on Time magazine’s radar in ’53, a rare crossover, like Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in reverse.
The book was all about gnosticism.
Voegelin had been tracing gnosticism throughout history with the doggedness of a cocaine-fueled Harvey Weinstein searching under tables for the actress to whom he’d just promised a co-starring role with DiCaprio in a Scorsese film.
But then he hit the brakes.
He didn’t start doubting the reality of the gnostic phenomenon—spiritually-diseased thinkers and movements who insisted everyone else share their disease—but he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the right term. He and his disciples started tossing around terms like “psychic disorientation” and “pneumapathological consciousness”—jargon about as suitable for popular consumption as the Edsel.
By the time Voegelin died in ’85, his ideas were fading faster than a Polaroid in the sun, and “Gnosticism” became just another vague slur that intellectuals flung at anyone they didn’t like. A few Voegelin diehards kept the flame alive, but the world moved on.
Then, like a plot twist, scientists started poking at the brain and noticed something wild: the two hemispheres of our brains attend to the world differently.
Forget the old “left brain logic, right brain artsy” nonsense; that was as debunked as phrenology. No, both sides of the brain can handle the same tasks, but how they attend to the tasks is different. Both hemispheres might hold the door open for the lady, but the right hemisphere does it out of decorum . . . the left hemisphere, in hopes that he can bang her later.
Iain McGilchrist, in his 2009 bestselling masterpiece The Master and His Emissary, laid it out with the clarity of a bell rung in a morgue. The left hemisphere is a control freak, obsessed with categories, rules, and slicing the world into neat little boxes. The right? It’s the poet, the humorist, appreciating the gestalt and soaking in the whole messy, interconnected sprawl of existence.
McGilchrist’s Hemisphere Hypothesis is still rippling through the intellectual swamp. Thinkers and writers are wrestling with and developing it, which is fitting for the metaphysical revolution it sparked.
Heck, even McGilchrist is still unpacking it.
Like he did a few days ago, when he made the connection that Voegelin nerds have been waiting for since 1952.
In that post, McGilchrist pointed at Puritanism and said, That’s the left hemisphere run amok. Literalism, self-righteousness, book-burning, beauty-hating, history-erasing fanaticism.
It’s Voegelin’s gnosticism, repackaged in neuroscientific wrapping. Left-hemisphere dominance is “psychic disorientation,” “pneumapathological consciousness,” or, to keep it street, a jacked-up worldview.
We’re living in the Left Hemisphere Empire.
Modernity, with its fetish for rationality and scientific yardsticks, kicked the right hemisphere to the curb during the Enlightenment. The result? Gnostic cults sprout like weeds in a vacant lot. Every ideologue with a manifesto is a Puritan reborn, whether they’re torching statues or canceling heretics on YouTube. Western culture’s drowning in these brain-damaged crusaders, and the only way out is to let the right hemisphere take the Master wheel again.
Voegelin was screaming about this spiritual disease in the ’50s, but his message didn’t get far.
But now the bestselling McGilchrist has picked up the same megaphone. It’s like he’s finishing Voegelin’s sentences across the decades.
And it’s probably just in time. Things are looking grim. The gnostics aren’t freaks like they were in previous ages. They’re the Establishment, and they’re looking to spread their spiritual disease like an extroverted close-talker spreads viruses.
