Getting to the Root of the Matter: A Hemispheric Look at Gardening
Gardening is just a hobby, and it might not always be practical. But it is arguably the pursuit that postmodern man needs the most. A Copernican revolution in metaphysics explains why.
I lost a lot of money in the 2008-2009 crisis. I was doing alright but lawyers throughout Michigan were shuttering their practices. I knew it could become difficult to sustain my homemaker wife and seven young children.
An acquaintance asked me if I’d ever tried square-foot gardening. I hadn’t. He said it worked great for him, even though he’d had no gardening experience. I read a book about it. A gardener was born.
My mom tried vegetable gardening in the 1970s. She churned an area next to our house and planted tomatoes. I had to do the weeding, but she did everything else. After a few months, she brought in tomatoes.
My accountant father observed that the same tomatoes could’ve been bought for $3.00 and my Mom had spent that much in supplies, plus a lot of time (I don’t recall that he expressed much concern about my time). He gently suggested that the whole thing wasn’t worth it, my mom agreed, and the plot went back to shrubs.
It reminds me of a museum curator overhearing a tour guide telling a group that a dinosaur skeleton was nine million and six years old. The curator later asked the guide how he knew that. The guide replied, “Well, it was nine million years old when I started working here, and that was six years ago . . . “.
The guide’s dinosaur account was precise but not accurate.
My dad’s tomato accounting was also precise. My mom’s gardening efforts were a net loss, even with my serf labor.
The lesson stuck with me. Until the financial crisis, then I started to mull it over and realized gardening can save a family money if done at a big enough scale to justify the upfront investment. I also began to read about rising pesticides in our food, soil depletion, and how produce loses a lot of nutrients before it reaches the shopping cart.
I realized my father’s conclusion was precise but not accurate.
Iain McGilchrist published his bestseller, The Master and His Emissary, in 2009. He followed it with The Matter with Things in 2021. These books explain “The Hemisphere Hypothesis” and explore its implications. The Hemisphere Hypothesis uses neurological evidence to examine differences between our brain’s left and right hemispheres. It has been referred to as a “Copernican revolution in metaphysics.”
The Hemisphere Hypothesis can be boiled down to three points:
1. The left hemispheres and right hemispheres of our brains do the same things.
2. But they attend to the world differently. Their dispositions are different.
The left hemisphere’s role is to get things done. It accordingly attends to the world with focus and purpose, which means it approaches things with dispositions of manipulation, control, and accomplishment. It cultivates tools that help it, like abstract ideas that give it principles for maneuvering and explicit knowledge that puts the ideas into action; plans, processes, and predictions for implementing action; precision for measuring effectiveness. Bureaucracy, McGilchrist likes to point out, is left-hemispheric.
The right hemisphere attends to the world with broad attention, a degree of detachment, which gives rise to wonder and curiosity. It appreciates implicit knowledge. It knows truth can be paradoxical and elusive. It’s more concerned about the whole and appreciates that the flow of life eludes precision, process, and planning. McGilchrist calls the right hemisphere “a bureaucrat’s nightmare.”1
3. The right hemisphere is the rightful master in the relationship. It appreciates the left hemisphere’s importance, while also knowing that the left hemisphere’s tools are limited. In the modern era, however, the left hemisphere has usurped the master’s role. The left hemisphere neither understands nor appreciates the right hemisphere’s importance. It values the right hemisphere as much as Lenin valued the Romanovs. This left-hemispheric hegemony has contributed greatly to the mess we call “modernity.” I believe left-hemispheric hegemony is the essence of modernity.
I also believe postmodernity is the era of our attempt to recover from modernity: our attempt to subdue the left hemisphere and restore the right hemisphere’s master role. This attempt is often theoretical, like the philosophy of deconstructionism that attacks modern philosophy’s emphasis on linguistic and logical rigor (pursuits the left hemisphere loves). The attempt is also practical and has given rise to a number of “fads,” such as the neo-psychedelic movement, mindfulness meditation, and “dopamine detoxes.”
One of those practical fads to restore the right hemisphere’s master role ought to be gardening.
I started The Daily Eudemon in 2004. The average blog lives for two years, so it’s 800 years old in blog years. “Kevin” has been a fan since the beginning. When I started to blog about gardening, he let me know he’s a lifelong gardener and was available to offer advice.
It was a bad move by Kevin. I peppered his email box with questions. Being new to gardening, everything was uncertain. “I planted arugula seeds by scattering them on the surface of the soil and now there’s a blistering rain. Will the seeds run off?” That’s an actual example and, yes, I’m kind of ashamed of it, especially considering the scores of other bothersome questions I sent to him. The uncertainty of gardening made me anxious.
Anxiety comes from fear, including fear of frustration. Fear of frustration comes from an attitude that hates wasted effort. Hatred of wasted effort comes from a worldview that prizes accomplishment. An emphasis on accomplishment comes from the left hemisphere, which is meant to get things done.
One year, I went to weed a plot with a Nejiri Gama hoe (the best inexpensive weeding tool in the free world) and discovered that the neighbor’s dog had destroyed the plot’s seedlings. I threw the hoe against the fence and taught toddlers in the next county words they shouldn’t know until their teen years. It was one of many such incidents. Back then, I jokingly referred to myself as “the Swearing Gardener.”
Anger, says McGilchrist, is the most highly-characteristic emotion of the left-hemispheric. Anger is frustration boiled over, and only the left hemisphere gets frustrated.
It’s not just anger, though. I believe all the cardinal sins are left hemispheric.
Cardinal sins aren’t specific acts. They’re dispositions that erupt into sinful acts. That’s also what distinguishes the hemispheres. The left hemisphere’s efforts aren’t sinful, but its disposition is . . . if not held in check by the right hemisphere.
The desire for sex might be the cardinal sin of lust that eventually results in disordered acts, ranging from pornography to adultery. Or it might be a proper channeling of a natural drive through the institution of marriage. Lust is the unbridled left hemisphere and its dispositions to conquer and succeed. There’s a reason the worn metaphor refers to “notches on the bedpost”: they’re trophies, and trophies are important to the left hemisphere because they confirm accomplishment.
The left hemisphere’s way of doing things, by itself, isn't sinful. Does it devise abstract ideas to guide its actions, divide jobs into parts to make them more manageable, implement plans to help ensure a project is completed? Yes. That’s just the way it operates . . . the way it needs to operate.
The garden is a project comprised of smaller projects and those smaller projects are further divided into yet smaller projects, which are then further divided. The gardening process is like a matryoshka doll carved by Geppetto on Benzedrine.
My youngest son makes great salsa from tomatillos and jalapeno peppers. He asked me in May, “Can you grow tomatillos and jalapenos so I can use them to make my salsa this summer?” I shook my head. There’s a process, I explained. Order seeds in February, germinate seeds in March, acclimate seedlings to the outdoors in April, transplant seedlings in May, plead with the nature gods June through September.
The process requires a plan. The plan must be broken into parts. Each part requires precision or skill. The entire thing presumes an ambition, even if it’s a small one: harvesting tomatillos and peppers that can be used to make salsa. The left hemisphere excels at these things.
Enter the Swearing Gardener.
The mail-order seeds don’t arrive. They don’t germinate (germination is sometimes so mysterious, a few gardeners think the lunar cycle dictates success). A late frost kills them. Fungus, blight, bugs, and groundhogs kill them. Maybe someone steals the matured produce (it has happened to me).
To the left hemisphere, gardening is like a dog introduced to a leash. The dog starts to run, only to reach the end of the leash and get yanked to a violent stop. If that happens enough, the dog’s sprints get more subdued. In the garden, after repeated setbacks, the left hemisphere gets subdued.
It's when the left hemisphere is beaten down that the right hemisphere can reassert itself. All those setbacks and failures are met with the right hemisphere’s signature move: the shrug. Detached observation with a measure of curiosity and resignation.
The right hemisphere is receptive to those things offered by the garden: uncertainty, failure, surprise, patience, slowness, curiosity.
The left hemisphere, too, is receptive to things required by the garden: planning, procedures, precision.
But gardening keeps the right hemisphere in the master position by slapping down the left hemisphere.
When properly engaged, gardening allows both hemispheres to work at their optimal levels: the left engaged in the details and the right engaged in fitting the left’s efforts into a greater whole. If the left hemisphere gets unruly (i.e., starts to give out-sized importance to, or belief in the effectiveness of, its efforts), reality will slap it down.
Other hobbies can do the same thing, but to a lesser degree. Golf, for instance, triggers left-hemispheric anger,2 but it doesn’t correspondingly offer premium right-hemispheric opportunities. Gardening requires a constant sense of deference and acceptance. A gardener, McGilchrist explains, “cannot create a plant or make it grow; a gardener can only permit and encourage the plant to do what it does.” The right hemisphere also specializes in and appreciates embodied knowledge (the kind of knowledge that comes from putting fingers in the soil), which is more accurate than the logical and abstract knowledge favored by the left hemisphere.
“The heart’s unrest,” wrote physicist Friedrich Waismann, “is not to be stilled by logic.”
I’d take the point further: logic, along with other left-hemispheric tools, contributes to the heart’s unrest. Our culture’s most profound thinkers have repeatedly warned us about the limits and dangers of the left hemisphere’s tools (The Matter with Things’ bibliography runs 180 pages and contains over 4,000 entries).
Even at the earliest stages of modernity, Pascal warned us about the left hemisphere by reminding us that the heart has reasons the head can’t understand.
The garden, I submit, is the best practical tool for coming to respect the heart’s reasons. It might not be for everyone, but it offers a unique opportunity for overcoming modernity’s malaise.
The Swearing Gardener didn’t live long. He isn’t sustainable in the garden (or life in general, for that matter). He faded away and the Frustrated Gardener moved in. He stayed a bit longer, but was replaced by the Anxious Gardener, who didn’t die, but kinda moved away and was replaced by today’s Shrugging Gardener.
The Anxious Gardener still shows up occasionally, like earlier this year when I realized my 15 hills of pumpkin and winter squash didn’t germinate (did I mention germination almost seems like a mystery?). But when he appears, the Shrugging Gardener waves him off. Maybe the seeds germinated but bugs from the mulch ate the seedlings before he could see them. Maybe cats dug them out. How do five different cultivars spread across 15 areas all fail to germinate . . . and does it, in the grand scheme, matter?
Curiosity. Wonder. Sometimes even a little chuckling at nature’s whimsy. They’re all part of a natural harvest when the right hemisphere occupies its proper position.
Here’s McGilchrist’s summary, which he published in the March 2024 edition of First Things:
What are these two hemispheric visions of the world like? You may recognize them from experience. The left hemisphere, using narrow-beam attention to one detail after another, sees what is familiar, certain, static, explicit, abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts. All is predictable and controlled. This is an inanimate universe—and a bureaucrat’s dream. It is like a map in relation to the mapped world: useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out. And its only value resides in its utility.
The left hemisphere perceives everything as a re-presentation. “To represent” literally means to present a thing again, when it is no longer present, but dead and gone. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees not the representation but the living presence. Bringing broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to bear on the world, it sees what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential. It understands all that is, and must remain, implicit: humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred, indeed everything we love; it understands that nothing is ever static and unchanging, that everything is flowing and interconnected. This is a free world, an animate universe—and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. It has all the richness and complexity of that world the left hemisphere simply mapped.
“A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. . . . Anal rage and checkered berets.” David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (2020 printing), p. 163. It’s buried in the middle of a ten-page paragraph, such is this crazy book.
Thanks. Golf, to me, is a puzzle. OTOH, I think it offers right-hemispheric possibilities, and I've written elsewhere that golf allows participants to glimpse the Tao, but OTOH, it strikes me as a colossal waste of precious time (but the fear of wasting time is, OTTH, a left-hemispheric propensity).
**OTTH: "on the third hand"
Excellent. And this explains why I’m so bad at golf!