Saturday, 4/25/26

The Right Way to Talk About War

What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.

You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.

Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.

We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?

This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.

If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?

While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.

Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.

Peggy Noonan (shared link).

Why left-hemisphere dominance?

With apologies to Emerson, why is the left hemisphere in the saddle, riding mankind?

I think [the left hemisphere’s] success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. … Third, the left hemisphere is also … the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning.

Every of those four points distills hundreds of pages from McGilchrist’s very much larger works. But because of some other things I read recently that haunt me, the final one has created one of my exciting moments where I (silently) exult “Oh! That meshes with these other points! I’ve almost got it now: the grand unified theory of how everything works!”

Here’s one of the other thing I read:

We are discovering, for example, that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

L.M. Sacasas.

I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, McGilchrist’s final point about “the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally,”

The other thing I read (actually, heard and transcribed) was this:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist.

My frustration with headstrong Protestants briefly led me off into thinking that, the Reformation having been midwifed by the left hemisphere, Protestants today remain too left-hemispheric.

I still think so, but then I realized that Protestantism never sits still — that the charismatic renewal of the 60s and 70s, and the happy-clappy guitar-and-drum assemblies of today, just might be human beings wittingly or unwittingly trying to counter-balance their left hemispheres.

I have learned to prefer icons, incense, fasting, feasting, eucharist and apophaticism generally to such ersatz, but à chacûn son gout.

More reasons to discipline yourself to spend more time attending to your world in a right-hemispheric way.

Learning to attend in an LLM world

Rules produce compliance. Distinctions produce discernment. Digital platforms are engineered to collapse that discernment. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, and for frictionless fulfillment. The tech arrives dressed as toys.

In an operating room, no one bans scalpels. Nor does a surgeon treat them casually. Instead, there’s a ritual: scrubbing in. The scrub-in isn’t merely about hygiene. It’s a cognitive threshold. It marks a passage from ordinary space to consequential space by establishing the sterile field: a bounded space of deliberate intervention where carelessness is as much the enemy as contamination. It means recognizing that environments carry risks and risks require care ….

…

[S]tudents don’t need prohibitions enforced by administrations, but disciplined practices modeled by adults; they need to learn to “scrub in” for the classroom. That means leaving things behind as well as bringing things in, not only in terms of the materials students bring to class but also the attitudes and sense of purpose as well.

In my own classes, this can be as simple as examining the threshold. At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do.

My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it.

Justin Neuman, Scrubbing In.

Neuman’s students are lucky to have such a thoughtful teacher, and he’s lucky to have students with the seriousness not to take governing their attention as a total joke.

If that’s actually happening, that is. Alan Jacobs doubts that it is, and focuses on pen-and-paper instruction.

Trump

Hereditary power

Nick Catoggio suspects that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance will both get straight-armed in 2028:

From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing, family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.

…

You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.

Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well. Dramatically.

Nick Catoggio, The Son Also Rises, speculating about Donald Jr. in 2028.

Why would a smart young conservative work for Trump?

After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.

One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.

Nick Catoggio, However Much You Admire Danielle Sassoon, It’s Not Enough (February 14, 2025)

Why I’d like for the GOP to lose the Senate this Fall

In my first draft of this sub-post, I indulged in some political wool-gathering about my current personal political proclivities. I decided to spare the world from slop that doubtless is more fascinating to me than it’s likely to be to anyone else.

But one thing stood out as worthy of publication:

Of course, the Supreme Court poses the highest stakes of all. The two oldest justices are Trump’s most reliable stalwarts, Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76. CBS News reports that neither plans to retire in 2026, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cajoling them to step aside.

Elie Honig, Trump Seems to Be Planning Ahead for Losing the Senate. I don’t necessarily agree that the Court is “the highest stakes of all,” but it’s pretty important.

I hope neither Alito nor Thomas succumbs to Trump’s cajoling. Next, I don’t want either justice to die between this Fall’s election and Inauguration Day 2028, but if that should happen, I’d want Democrats in control of the Senate to force Trump into nominating someone well-enough qualified to gain a few Democrat votes for confirmation.

I don’t think we have any political hacks on the Court currently — neither Republican nor Democrat — but with Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump could nominate Emil Bove or John Eastman or the winner of the Kentucky Derby (the equine, not the jockey) and the Senate would confirm him (the filibuster for SCOTUS justices having been abolished). Having already trashed the Department of Justice with political hacks, putting political hacks on SCOTUS would set us back years further in the steps to post-Trump recovery.

Will Trump shoot himself in the foot again?

[I]t was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

Ross Douthat (emphasis added)

Breaking the trolling cycle

Be honest. Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.

Bari Weiss

Shorts

We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands. (Jacob Imam, founder of the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, OH, where students get a liberal arts degree and trade training, graduating debt-free.)
Jonathan Dupiton, host of the Rich and Unemployed podcast, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a $3.8 million unemployment fraud scheme. Turns out the secret to being rich and unemployed is crime. (TMD)
All material culture is an instantiation of ideas. But it’s easier to see ideas-in-things with a knowing, irony-laden look at the past. Putting babies on display in incubators, especially because they were ones unlikely to survive, now strikes us as abhorrent. We feel confident in seeing its errors and therefore reassured by our good judgment. It’s much harder to see what’s unfolding right in front of us. (Sara Hendren, Pattern Recognition)
Be it noted, please!, that NATO nations pledge to help defend countries attacked from outside NATO. It does not oblige anyone to help Donald Trump prosecute an offensive war against Iran.
No need to spend any money on a hot water heater, as hot water doesn’t need heating. Now, if we’re talking a water heater, different story (yes, I’m THAT GUY). (Social media poster, name withheld by me.)
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward Murrow)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here; (b). I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Last Sunday of 2025

How to use, and not to use, AI

Okay, this may seem out of place. My Sunday posts are usually “religious”- that undefinable, indispensable concept we apply to some ultimate concerns but not to others.

But there are two things I’d like to say about AI:

I like it quite a lot. I’m gradually finding more applications for it, and it can be very helpful.
I’m seriously concerned that misuse of AI can be spiritually damaging. That’s why I think this is a fit Sunday topic.

It’s not damaging because it’s demonic. I’d quit it if I thought that. I’m no demon-tamer. But there is one fairly sharp distinction between things it’s good for and things where using it can be deranging and rarely is helpful.

AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain which can free up a lot of your time to go spend it on the right by loving other people. But we probably will screw it up by pretending that AI is your therapist, friend or lover, all of which are actually right-brain things. If you’re using it to help your right brain, you’re getting it wrong and your brain won’t be fooled. You will not fool yourself. Even if it passes the Turing test in your consciousness, in your subconscious you’ll become more anxious, more lonely, more afraid and more depressed.

Arthur Brooks

I have not been using AI to do right-brain things, but neither was I thinking “Okay, having gotten all that tedious, analytical left-brain stuff out of the way, let’s do something right-brained.”

Brooks’ insistence against AI for right-brain stuff isn’t just ipse dixit. AI has no intuition, no meaning machine, no metaphysics, and all indications are that it never will. If you ask it a metaphysical question, it will do something like culling probable word sequences from college bull sessions that have been transcribed, from which it will spit out an “answer” of sorts, but not one that will prove satisfying.

This explains my sense of how spiritually dangerous it is when people take on AI boyfriends and girlfriends, or look to AI as a therapist.

So when you’ve freed up time by using AI appropriately, Brooks has six non-psychedelic ways of accessing your right hemisphere (volunteered when Andrew Sullivan, interviewing him, extolled the virtues of psilocybin for accessing meaning):

Ask questions that can’t be Googled. This is why college bull sessions were so valuable and happiness-making. If you ask a question that can be answered by AI (meaningfully, that is; AI will always make up some kind of “answer”), it’s not a right-hemisphere question.
Fall in love. Our becoming more left hemispheric is why more people are less capable and less interested in falling in love.
Worship. Look for the metaphysical. If you’re not religious, figure out what it means to transcend yourself.
Beauty. You need more beauty: moral, natural and artistic.
Look for a calling in what you do.
Find meaning in suffering.

I’ve almost entirely ignored Brooks’ Atlantic articles, assuming he was a male Oprah. I was very wrong. He’s a daily-mass Catholic on a mission from God and I intend to look at all his articles from here forward.

Not my God

Seventeenth-century thinkers, among whom “nearly all original philosophical minds were Nominalist,” showed that they could be quite loquacious when it came to talking about God based on reason. Apparently unbeknownst to some of them, it was no longer the transcendent God of traditional Christianity about whom they were speaking. Augustine had famously said in one of his sermons that “if you comprehended [cepisti], it is not God.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

On a related note, something from Father Patrick Henry Reardon has stuck with me for decades now. I can’t give an exact quote, but it was basically that every Christian heresy stems from efforts to make logical something meant to be received as mystery.

There is no need to be profane, my dear boy.

‘Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?’
‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?’
‘We call it Hell.’
‘There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently.’
‘Discuss Hell reverently? I meant what I said. You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.’

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. Almost thou persuadest me of purgatory, Clive.

I’ve been a Lewis fan since college, though I’ve read most of his stuff so often that I rarely read it any more.

The exceptions are The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man. The former is the Lewis book that most tangibly affected me. Lewis made it plausible that most of the day-trippers to Heaven got back on the bus to hell; I didn’t want to be like them. How that ramified is that rarest of things: something I intend to keep private.

Almost syllogistic

I enjoyed reading Martin Shaw’s latest retelling (I Saw Christ on a Hill) of his re-conversion to Christianity, settling in its Orthodox expression. It makes my own conversion (from Calvinism to Orthodoxy) look almost syllogistic in comparison.

God works in mysterious ways — perhaps especially so with dense, mythical/mystical mensches like Martin.

Shorts

But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? (Brad East)
It is hard to be saved if we have them; and impossible if we love them; and scarcely can we have them, but we shall love them inordinately. (St. Augustine on riches)

[This post was edited after first publication. The meaning doesn’t change, but when I read it after it posted, I found one awkward and redundant section.]

Book notes: The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is, I’m pretty sure, the heftiest book I read in 2021. I’ve been reviewing my Readwise notes on-and-off now for a full day.

Selected notes are more than enough material for a blog the reader can really chew on for a while. While context is missing, I’ve tried to avoid notes that require the context for any understanding:

[B]y showing that the left hemisphere, which underwrites the fragmented vision, is both literally more limited in what it can see, and less capable of understanding what it does see, than the right – and, to cap it all, is less aware of its own limitations – the book gives the reader good reason to reappraise the left hemisphere’s world view, wherever it can be identified as such.
[S]ince the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision.
A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to the prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain. Science, however, purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted. Yet this highly objective stance, this ‘view from nowhere’, to use Nagel’s phrase, is itself value-laden. It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed.
[I]t is the right hemisphere that has the intuitive sense of numbers and their relative size. However, the sense is approximate and does not have precision. The left hemisphere, by contrast, has precision, but it has no intuitive sense of what it is actually doing, other than following rules and manipulating symbols.
‘If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’ … one feels so hopeless relying on the written word to convey meaning in humanly important and emotionally freighted situations. … It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous. … a right-hemisphere stroke, although not involving speech directly, is in practice more disabling than a left-hemisphere stroke, despite the fact that in a left-hemisphere stroke speech is usually lost.
[P]oetry evolved before prose … Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally ‘pedestrian, or walking, logos’, as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry.
The belief that one cannot think without language is yet another fallacy of the introspective process, whereby thinking in words about language only serves to confirm the importance of the verbal process. When we consciously introspect, or retrospect, on our own thought processes, and try to construct what happens, how the mind works, we can do so only as we would under those circumstances try to achieve the task, consciously, putting it in words. But the mind is not like this. We carry out most mental processes that would normally constitute what we mean by thinking without doing anything consciously, or in language, at all.
[P]hilosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process. It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick. While such a characterisation is not true of most pre-Socratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, it is at least true of the majority of philosophers since Plato in the West until the nineteenth century, when, for example, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche began to question the basis on which philosophy made its advances.
According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts … According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole ….
The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’. If we had no concept of truth, we could not state anything at all, and it would even be pointless to act.
The fact that in the twentieth century philosophers, like physicists, increasingly arrived at conclusions that are at variance with their own left-hemisphere methodology, and suggest the primacy of the world as the right hemisphere would deliver it, tells us something important.
It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.
It is not that one or other hemisphere ‘specialises in’, or perhaps even ‘prefers’, whatever it may be, but that each hemisphere has its own disposition towards it, which makes one or another aspect of it come forward – and it is that aspect which is brought out in the world of that hemisphere.
The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care.
[T]he immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else.
With the advent of Romanticism, paradox became once more not a sign of error, but, as it had been seen by Western philosophers before Plato, and by all the major schools of thought in the East before and since, as a sign of the necessary limitation of our customary modes of language and thought, to be welcomed, rather than rejected, on the path towards truth. ‘Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great’, wrote Friedrich Schlegel.
The means of argument – the three Ls, language, logic and linearity – are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control, so that the cards are heavily stacked in favour of our conscious discourse enforcing the world view re-presented in the hemisphere which speaks, the left hemisphere, rather than the world that is present to the right hemisphere. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic; the difficulty lies with those who are aware that this does not exhaust the possibilities, and have nonetheless to use analytic methods to transcend analysis. … Coupled with its preference for classification, analysis and sequential thinking, this makes [the left hemisphere] very powerful in constructing an argument. By contrast it is hard for the right hemisphere to be heard at all: what it knows is too complex, hasn’t the advantage of having been carved up into pieces that can be neatly strung together, and it hasn’t got a voice anyway.
Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith … It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts….
One can see the second process (a rejection of the right hemisphere’s world) in the way in which the decline of metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual into the inauthentic repetition of empty procedures in the Middle Ages prompted, not a revitalisation of metaphoric understanding, but an outright rejection of it, with the advent of the Reformation … The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.
Decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because of the confounding of the animate and the inanimate, and the impossibility of seeing that one can live in the other metaphorically. In a world where metaphoric understanding is lost we are reduced to ‘either/or’, as Koerner says. Either the statue is God or it is a thing: since it is ‘obviously’ not God, it must be a thing, and therefore ‘mere wood’, in which case it has no place in worship.
Protestantism being a manifestation of left-hemisphere cognition is – even though its conscious self-descriptions would deny this – itself inevitably linked to the will to power, since that is the agenda of the left hemisphere.
Removing the places of holiness, and effectively dispensing with the dimension of the sacred, eroded the power of the princes of the Church, but it helped to buttress the power of the secular state.
In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.
There are obvious continuities between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. They share the same marks of left-hemisphere domination: the banishment of wonder; the triumph of the explicit, and, with it, mistrust of metaphor; alienation from the embodied world of the flesh, and a consequent cerebralisation of life and experience.
The destruction of the sacerdotal power of the Church was a goal of the French Revolution, as it had been of the Reformation. The Reformation, however, had not been nakedly, explicitly, secular: it had purported to replace a corrupt religion with a purified one. All the same its effect had been to transfer power from the sacerdotal base of the Catholic Church to the state, an essential part of the relentless process of secularisation, in the broadest sense – by which I mean the re-presentation of human experience in purely rationalistic terms, necessarily exclusive of the Other, and the insistence that all questions concerning morality and human welfare can and should be settled within those terms – which I would see as the agenda of the left hemisphere.
The appeal to reason can lead to sweetness and light, but it can also be used to monitor and control, to constrict and repress, in keeping with my view that the aim of the left hemisphere is power. With time, a dark side to the Enlightenment became too obvious to conceal.
In Shakespeare, tragedy is no longer the result of a fatal flaw or error: time and again it lies in a clash between two ways of being in the world or looking at the world, neither of which has to be mistaken. In Shakespeare tragedy is in fact the result of the coming together of opposites.
Eichendorff said that Romanticism was the nostalgia of Protestants for the Catholic tradition.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.