Iain McGilchrist's talk on work

It's a strange fact that the better we have got at manipulating the world, the less meaning we seem to find in it. Why would that be?

I am often asked to speak because of a book I wrote about the structure of the brain, addressing the vexed topic of the difference between the brain hemispheres. I am not going to speak about it today – there isn’t nearly enough time – but its thesis will inform what I have to say. Because it has to do with meaning.

In brief the difference between the brain hemispheres lies not, as if they were machines, in what they do, but, as befits a part of a person, in the way they do it.

Forget what you have been told. Each is involved in language, reason, visual imagery, emotion, imagination and the rest – but in a consistently different way. And this has to do with survival.

Every creature needs to solve a conundrum: how to eat and stay alive. For in order to eat it needs to pay a very particular type of attention: narrow-beam, fixed on its target and blind to everything else, precise, enabling a grasp that is swift and accurate. But if it is not to become someone else’s lunch while getting its own, it needs at the very same time to pay the exact opposite type of attention: a broad, sustained vigilance, maximally alert to whatever it may find, without preconception, be it friend or foe.

So difficult is this for one consciousness to achieve, that every known animal – fish, amphibian, reptile, bird or mammal – has solved the problem by having two ‘brains’, closely connected, but also remarkably capable of independence: hence the two hemispheres. It is the left hemisphere that has developed the capacity for very narrow, sharply-focussed attention, and the right hemisphere that has developed the capacity to see the whole picture.

Once again may I emphasise: the difference is not between logic and emotion, or between being down to earth and airy fairy, or male and female, or any other of these daft generalisations. It is about attention. And everything flows from that. Putting it very simply, the left hemisphere sees a world of things: fragments that are familiar, precise, inert, inanimate, isolated, disconnected from us, and there for us to manipulate. The right hemisphere by contrast sees a world of relationships: living, changing, infinitely interconnected elements in a continuous flow from which they can never be isolated, any more than they can from us: a world that we can understand and has meaning. Things in themselves have no meaning: meaning comes from relationship.

Everything that exists is made up of the same set of particles – what makes the difference between you, a tree, and a boiled egg is just the relationship of the particles to one another. The meaning comes not from the particles, the bits, which are in themselves undifferentiated, meaningless, but from the relationship between them.

The most moving piece of music you ever heard is just a collection of meaningless notes from one point of view: from the other the meaning arises from the relationship, which makes the melody, the harmony and so on. And so it is with everything in life we value: its meaning comes from relationship – with your loved ones, the place where you belong, your friends, the natural world itself, a work of art, a poem or a symphony. It all lies in relationships, not in things themselves. When we see the world with targeted, narrow beam attention it is just a meaningless heap of things to be grabbed. When we see the world as a whole with broad open attention its meaning

and richness come to meet us.

How does this relate to the topic of interest to us all here today, that of work and its meaning?

An American is watching an Indian woodcarver, who is putting the finishing touches to a statue of Lord Shiva. ‘How much is this statue?’ he asks. The carver does not look up. ‘One dollar’, comes the reply. Unable to believe his ears, and seeing both the amount of work involved, and a business opportunity before him, the visitor asks: ‘And if I wanted 100, how much would that be?’ The Indian puts down his work and shrugs. ‘Oh, that would be – that would be $2,000’, he replies. Puzzled, the American asks why the price is so much more, not less. The carver replies: ‘Because I don't want to make 100 of them …’

What is work? And what does it mean in each of our lives?

As a psychiatrist I have seen many people whose work made them sick; and I have seen those who were made sick by having no work to go to. Is work a blessing or a curse? Does it give life meaning or rob it of meaning?

The Greek island of Icaria hit the news when someone noticed that its inhabitants regularly lived to be over 100 years old. A man born there, but living in the US, was given 6 months to live, and decided to return to Icaria to pass his last days among the people he knew and loved. That was 50 years ago, and in his 90s he is still cultivating his vegetables. What is the secret of the island life? When everything else was taken into account, the main things that stood out were the habit of rising late (the doctor’s surgery didn’t even open till 11 am), taking at least one good daytime nap, drinking 2/3 of a litre of wine a day, and working for a few hours in the open air growing food.

My own suspicion is that genes played a part, too – but the prescription for a good life is so good, why spoil it?

The ancient Greeks had no great love of work, either. They saw it as a necessity whose purpose was to clothe, shelter and feed the population, but that once that was out of the way, they could get back to the real business of life, namely leisure. By this they did not mean just lazily lying about, nor, as leisure often seems to be nowadays, the frenetic pursuit of stimulation in a desperate attempt to fill the void so that we do not have to contemplate the emptiness of existence. No, it was a cultivation of stillness, the devotion of time and attention to the things that matter, and that have no ulterior purpose – and are therefore in grave danger, nowadays, of being considered pointless: the life of the mind, the pursuit of wisdom, insight and beauty. Leisure was the disposition of receptive openness to what is, all that we miss as we rush through life on our way to the grave. Josef Pieper, a German philosopher writing just after the war, delivered a couple of famous lectures, later published as Leisure: the Basis of Culture. In one he wrote: ‘Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves.

We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.’ Busy-ness, he contended, was the true laziness, a failure to engage fully and responsibly with oneself and the world.

Historically this attitude was far commoner than our own view of work as a way of life. I had an English teacher who in his 40s left to farm a smallholding of 30 acres in

Wales: he and his family were largely self-sufficient, with their own sheep, ducks and hens, their own corn and vegetables. When I went to stay, I was astonished to find how much time we had for leisure, since I had anticipated it would be grindingly hard work. We put in about two or three hours in the morning, milling corn by hand, scything grass, chopping wood, and had the rest of the day free to read, talk and go for walks. When I expressed my astonishment, he explained that there were two busy periods a year: a couple of weeks in the spring, during lambing, and a couple of weeks in the autumn, for harvest, when they and their neighbours all mucked in to help one another, and some of those days were very long. Other than that there was no need for long hours. He recalled how William Langland berated the 14th century peasantry, because of their soft lives, demanding long lunch breaks and refusing to eat bread made from unrefined flour. He explained that it was only with the eighteenth century that farming life became hard, and country people were expected to work punishingly long days: landowners had discovered greed, otherwise known as capitalism. They, and therefore all around them, were no longer content to produce just what was needed by the community, but to make the land yield more and more, to sell the excess and to become rich on the profits. In this story, familiar to us today, there are some winners and many losers.

Work, then, was something largely to be avoided until the last couple of hundred years in the West, when it has become the badge of virtue. Josef Pieper again: ‘The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.’

Let’s just pause on that word ‘gift’. The Indian wood carver had a gift. In a sense letting his work go for a dollar was also making a gift of it. The attempt to instrumentalise, to ‘marketise’ (is that a word?), his work altered its nature, altered how he felt himself perceived, altered who he was. It made work into a form of bondage – which the carver resisted. We all have our gifts, and we all want to fulfil them. What we resist is when we have no choice about what we offer and how we offer it, and the gift is not recognised, perhaps not even exercised, and not received.

There is no ‘give’, only ‘take’, in this relationship.

I have seen people who gave all their working lives, because they grew up in an ethic where they believed loyalty would be rewarded. Often after a takeover, their loyalty was worth nothing, and they were demoted, sacked, given unreasonable targets; chewed and spat out when they became ill and could give no more. Others took their place, in turn broken by unrealistic expectations, little valued, to be chewed up and cynically spat out. Is this really what we want from a society, one we want to live in: a society devoid of trust, gratitude and fellowship, based on fear and control? To many of my broken, disheartened, burnt-out patients, my message was, ‘the pathology lies not in you, but in a system that has become toxic’.

Is this, though, where the logic of the market inevitably leads us? If you want to be competitive, do you not have to squeeze every last drop? Must not the Amazon employee be forbidden to sit down, and have no time to go to the lavatory, because an order must be filled every 30 seconds? My feeling is that the profits Amazon makes are large enough to allow people a loo break. What on earth do we take people for?

When I read the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn my blood ran cold when he casually mentioned that the stairwell on the way to the KGB’s interrogation rooms was netted to stop people throwing themselves over the bannisters. A haunting detail. In an article about Foxxcom, the ‘community’ (shame on the word) in China where the components for many of our novel gadgets are made, and where the buildings, too, are netted to stop people killing themselves, a spokesman is recorded as saying: ‘Workers like Li are in such abundance that they've become a resource in much the same manner as aluminium or plastic’. Human resources, a term that has always made me queasy, has an unfortunate ring about it. Personnel at least implied persons.

So is work good or bad for us?

When Hamlet said: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’, he didn’t mean that we can make up our own ethics as we go along. I believe what he meant was that how you choose to think of, to regard, attend to, anything in this world is a moral act, because it changes what it is you find there – and it changes you yourself. A certain attitude, a kind of attention to others and the world at large, can make you, and them, and the world flourish; another kind can enslave, reduce and destroy everything around us, all the good we live for.

Viewed with the attention of the left hemisphere, the world is a meaningless heap of resources to be exploited, manipulated and grasped. It is a neurological fact that the left hemisphere alone codes for tools and machines: and this is true even in lefthanders, who are using their right hemisphere in daily life to use tools and work machines. According to the take of the right hemisphere, to which our culture appears to be largely blind, the world is not a machine, but a living web of relationships, something living, vibrant – more like a dance than a heap of resources, something we need to engage with to understand. And if you think you are smart because you see the world the left hemisphere sees, you are not. It sees very little compared with what the right hemisphere sees, and IQ is associated with the function of the right hemisphere far more than that of the left.

How have people historically thought of work? It has its dark side, and it is an eyeopener to us modern Western liberals to see just how dark it gets. Work was a misfortune. The Saxon word for work, earfothe (related to the German word for work, Arbeit) meant ‘hardship’; and in turn both are derived from a Sanskrit root that means ‘the condition of being orphaned or sold into slavery’. The Latin-derived ‘labour’ is not much better. It means ‘distress’, ‘pain’, ‘suffering’, ‘hardship’ and ‘trouble’, as in the laboured breathing of a dying man, meanings preserved in the standard term, to this day, for giving birth, ‘to labour’.

And machines? Our word ‘robot’ comes from the Russian word rabota, meaning work: in turn its root rab means – distress. The Chinese have no better view of machines, created to be our servants, destined, it seems, to be our masters. The Chinese saw all this a long way off: their word for a ‘machine’ is derived from the word for a ‘shackle’ or ‘fetter’.

But the OE word, wyrcan, that gave us the modern English ‘work’, had a quite specific primary meaning. It most often came to mean to manipulate or mould (as we

say we ‘work’ putty or dough in our hands), but its original meaning was to weave.

To weave: as we say, needle-work, patch-work, a beautifully worked tapestry. And I was delighted to find that this idea of work as something skilful, beautiful, creative, rather than necessarily an intolerable affliction, is reflected in the modern French word for one’s trade or profession, son métier, which originally meant – one’s loom.

So what makes the difference between good and bad work? Let’s start with weaving, since there is undoubtedly a clue there. It is skilful, creative and its product is something demonstrable, beautiful, useful – an object of pride to the maker. And the weaver gives to the world. The weaver is relatively autonomous in using her skill, and she sees her skill acknowledged, and received by others. At least that was how it was – until the Industrial Revolution. Then her situation shifted radically: suddenly she had no choice in what she wove, or the hours she worked, her job, now done by frightening machines, became more notable for danger than for skill, and there was no peace, no silence, no time for sharing with others alongside whom she worked. She was herself reduced to a machine.

Money is a means, not an end in itself; people are ends, not a means to something else.

When we treat these as reversed, so that people are just a means to the end of making money, we have corrupted and debased them and our society and ourselves.

And what about work: is it a means or an end? When we take the broadest possible view, work is an unlikely end: as they say, very few people go to the grave wishing they had spent more time in the office. And yet work can be highly satisfying, affirming, rewarding – not just a means of paying bills. And we know, broadly, what people find makes work rewarding: autonomy, the exercise of skill, and the experience of working and living alongside others, in an atmosphere of sharing and trust.

When I trained as a doctor we were allowed to work in conditions that would be banned under the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. As a houseman I worked 120 hour weeks, and I could be on duty from 8 o’clock on Friday morning to 6 or 7 o’clock on Monday evening without a break, and with very little chance of sleep during that period. We had to eat when we could, often standing up, and it sometimes happened that we slept standing up, too … Those days were dangerous for patients and hardly good for us, yet there was a spirit that came from the sense of doing something skilful, with a team of others, against the odds. And when I was not too tired to see the funny side of anything, there were many laughs and a lot of camaraderie, not unlike the accounts some soldiers give of their time at war.

Like war, it should not be glorified, and it is far better that things have changed. But there is one thing now lacking. I remember reflecting that, after years and years of training, I was paid £1.33 an hour, a third of the overtime rate of the cleaners. But nobody ever looked at their watch and said it was time to go home. We took pride in our work, because what we did was impossible to calibrate, and we were respected, and we did many hours for nothing because that was what professionals did.

Autonomy is a funny word to use for what sounds like a form of slavery, but in fact no-one breathed down our necks to make us do things in a certain way or a certain order – as long as we did the job, we did it how best we could and as we thought right.

We actually had a great deal of autonomy. And that meant we had to be skilled. Now that nurses and doctors have been de-professionalised and managerialised, and turned into something more like cogs in a large machine, there is a tendency amongst some, that one can hardly blame, to resent working when they are not paid, to do what they are contracted to do and get out. The gift has been lost: instead the whole business is in danger of becoming just a commercial exchange, with consequent losses all round.

Money and value are not clearly related. Research going back 40 years has repeatedly shown that money can act as a disincentive and cause performance to deteriorate. As one researcher put it, ‘if I asked you to help me change a tyre, you might be willing to help. But if I give you a dollar for it, you don’t think “great, I get to help Iain and I get a dollar”, you think “it’s a dollar and I don’t work for a dollar …”’ You are instrumentalised. And if you think this sounds like a great way to reduce costs – just underpay people but instead capitalise on good will to get free labour – think again.

Because the sense of being instrumentalised, of being a means to an end, makes people feel like machines, and then they start behaving like machines. Thinking of ourselves (or others) as machines is the single biggest mistake we can make.

Your mother was right: the best things in life are free. What she may or may not have pointed out is that they can only be achieved obliquely, as a by-product of something else – not through an all-out frontal assault. Artificial worlds, including computer games, provide ‘direct connections between actions and outcomes’. Hence their obsessive appeal. In the real world, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Many things escape us the harder we pursue them, starting with sleep and moving on to sincerity, wisdom and (whatever the American Declaration of Independence may suggest to the contrary) happiness. As the economist and philosopher John Kay has pointed out in a wonderful little book, called Obliquity, many once great firms, ICI, Boeing, Pfizer and Citigroup among them, focussed, while they were profitable, on providing the best possible product and a top class service, then made the mistake, often following a takeover, of pursuing shareholder profit above all else – and subsequently fell apart.

The world is not a mechanism and neither are we: we don’t obey the same rules. A good machine produces as much as possible, as fast as possible and as precisely as possible. Applying these demands to humans are counter-productive. We talk nowadays, unbelievable as it would have seemed not many years ago, as if doctors, lawyers, teachers, policeman – or for that matter shop assistants, therapists, team leaders, artists, librarians, priests, musicians, or social workers – were there to develop a ‘product’ which we can then ‘get’ or consume. But this is nonsense. We don’t know beforehand what it is we are to go after and ‘get’, because it varies in every single case, and is dependent on a relationship between individuals. These processes are rarely better for the attempt to do more, faster or according to a standard specification. In fact each of these machine-driven demands is almost certain to make things palpably, miserably worse.

Machines can be predicted and controlled because we made them, and we know what they are for. We didn’t make people and we don’t know what they are for; and there are dangers to predicting and trying to control people. Nowadays we are in love with algorithms, guidelines and procedures. It is not that they have no use. For the beginner, the dull or the forgetful, they can save us from gross mistakes. But they

also save us from the chance of excellence. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in their book Mind Over Machine, describe five levels of expertise, in the lowest three of which, rules were in different ways beneficial or even necessary, but in the higher two of which they were actually harmful. As they put it, ‘an expert’s skill has become so much a part of him that he need be no more aware of it than he is of his own body’. I am not saying there should be no accountability; indeed I am saying the opposite. People tend to respond to the way they are treated. Treated as incapable of behaving responsibly themselves, they will become infantilised. Devolve decision-making and therefore true responsibility, as far as it possibly can be devolved, and they will rise to the challenge. Every step taken to enforce even necessary rules is a step away from life, spontaneity, alertness, responsiveness, creativity, pride in a professional ethic and morale. Its costs are high, though they do not appear immediately on the balance sheet. And it doesn’t stop failures occurring.

We should not be bewitched by our forms and our figures. Templates and algorithms, with their air of precision, are in fact always a less precise fit than a one-off assessment – unique and therefore tailored to the individual case. As Einstein remarked, ‘as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’ And an obsession with counting things, as he also pointed out, means that you miss the things that count most.

The most important things are always absent from the graph, because they can’t be precisely measured. But just because something is not precise does not make it less real or important. We cannot be precise about the nature of love, gravity, energy, matter or consciousness, but they are real enough. And so is time: real enough, but impossible to define.

Time is what we have stopped giving ourselves. But all that is creative, all that is properly balanced and properly thought through, depends on time. Rushing the process, like rushing sex, supper, or sunbathing, ruins it completely. You can see this in research, and you can see it in politics.

In the 1960s at the Rand Corporation bright people were given a room, and a few basics and told to do what they wanted. They didn't have to report every week, or every month or every year, even, on their productivity. That policy produced many of the greatest steps forward in the technology of the era: it almost certainly produced a few duds, too. But you can’t have it both ways. Science is not the orderly process it is sometimes thought to be, moving rationally from this step to that. Most great discoveries were made by people, often working alone, with freedom to experiment in ways that might have proved fruitless. You have to accept that some of it will go slowly, nowhere. But if you don’t, we’ll all be going nowhere fast.

Similarly in politics. If you don’t already know it, treat yourself to a fabulous read called The Blunders of Our Governments, by two political analysts, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. It is a dispassionate survey of the 20 worst calamities of government, both left and right, in the last four decades or so. There are two main lessons that emerged clearly for me, time and time again. Dissenters, who could see trouble coming, were loth to speak up for fear of being thought bad team players; and those who were charged with putting policy into practice were given ridiculously short timescales in which to operate. You may think you can’t afford to wait, but can you afford the disaster that will ensue when you don’t? And in my belief there should be

a Department of Inverted Policy, where people are paid to put the most negative possible spin on received wisdom, and investigate the opposite – just for the hell of it.

Despite the rhetoric we are a terribly conformist culture; have you noticed that court jesters are in short supply these days?

The left hemisphere thinks it knows everything, but it doesn’t know what it is that it doesn’t know. It thinks it must control. It thinks otherwise the world will fall apart.

It cannot trust. Its stance is, quite literally, paranoid (it goes into overdrive in the brains of those with schizophrenia). It also has, quite literally, a high opinion of itself compared with the right hemisphere (experimentally you can isolate each hemisphere and ask it). But the right hemisphere is smart: it is comparatively humble, it listens rather than directs, and it knows enough to realise what it cannot know.

It has been demonstrated time and again that we simply cannot predict the course of events, the movements of the market or the fate of an economy. Nobel prize winners seem to be the absolute worst. Ability and self-belief tend to be inversely related, in what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the blowhard school of excellence is not one you should aspire to belong to. Wise practitioners know how little they know. A wise manager controls his need to control. There needs to be a hand on the tiller, but the sign of skill is that the hand is almost imperceptibly light. Give people freedom to give of their best.

And the best gift is trust. Be worthy of trust yourself, cultivate trust in others, and be prepared to be ruthless if trust is seriously abused. That way work becomes lifegiving, creative and exciting. The alternative is to micro-manage your way into devitalised mediocrity. Then, the more we work, the less it works. So let us seek the opposite: let us work things less, so that it works more, and things begin to work for us again, instead of us working for things.