We've All Become at Least a Bit Monstrous Because Our Culture is Very Monstrous

Abnormality pumped Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's nads. The 19th-century French natural scientist was fascinated by things like a two-headed calf and a stillborn pig fetus with a single eye at the center of its face.

They were "monsters" in the medievalist's Latin jargon: monstrare: to show, display. Saint-Hilaire said the development of these baby monsters showed how normal fetal development occurs.

By seeing how monsters develop, we can better prevent monsters.

It's like un-role models. If George Washington and St. Francis can show us how to live, that broken-down drunk at the bar and your uncle who can't go within 200 feet of an elementary school arguably do something even more valuable: they show us how not to live.

We're celebrating the year of the saints right now, and it's a great thing. We should all cram a little more Butler's into our daily regimen.

But don't discard those one-eyed pig fetuses in history. How did Andy Warhol become "Andy Warhol"? Did Nietzsche induce his own collapse into madness on the streets of Turin? Why did Michel Foucault repeatedly play rectal Russian roulette at the height of the AIDS culture until he caught the disease?

They're good questions. By casting monsters into relief, we see good things better.

Yeah, I know: Many of these biographies are darker than ink spots on ebony, and damn it, life's too hard and too short already. I doff my fleece-lined knit hat to the folks who stick with Butler's, I really do, even during this blasted cold stretch that has deprived me of all feeling in my testicles for the past two weeks.

But here's the thing: We're kinda living in a world of one-eyed pigs right now. Monsters have become the norm. How else can you explain why we continue to celebrate the memory of Andy Warhol, who, Gore Vidal observed, is the only genius in history with an IQ of 60?

It's worth figuring out how the frick we got here. It's helpful to learn about that broken-down drunk's first beer at age 14 and how your Registered uncle started clicking on porn sites at 12 while his parents were at work. The creepy biographies show these one-eyed pigs in development.

I suspect the exercise will start showing us a lot of one-eyed pigs in the mirror.

Modern culture infuses us with the habit of looking at the world and approaching life with only one eye: our right one, which is controlled by the left hemisphere.

McGilchrist's three big volumes are snow globes of a culture blizzarded with left-hemispheric excess: a culture that sees with only one eye.

Once you notice that you're approaching life with only one eye, you start seeing instances all over the place. In my case, most of those instances are in my own soul. Unsettling? Yes, very much so. I half-quip and half-quiver when I refer to myself as a recovering left-hemispheric.

My consolation? The confessional primarily, but also Larry David. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld made oodles of money by repeatedly showing the fragility of left-hemispheric rationalism crashing against the rock reality of the world (a reality that can only be appreciated by the right hemisphere). I figure if comedians like Larry and Jerry can joke at their own left-hemispherism, I'm not entirely lost.

I'll give you my favorite example from my life, which could easily be adapted into a Seinfeld dialogue at Monk's Cafe.

I've long practiced the fine art of ghosting. When I've had enough socializing, I just leave a social gathering without saying goodbye. My friends and family long ago just accepted it, and I've long defended or at least tried to explain it (earlier treatments: link and link).

My defense of ghosting is, as far as my left-hemispheric/rational mind can see, pretty solid.

But here's a thing my left hemisphere doesn't appreciate: It's a dick thing to do.

Now, we could fall down the abyss of rationalist argumentation about why it's a dick thing to do or not a dick thing to do, Dick and No-Dick flailing away at one another like Gandalf and the Balrog. Goodness knows, I've run the dick/not-dick arguments through my head for years, normally the morning after ghosting, but I never resolved it (partly because, to detour parenthetically into one of P.G. Wodehouse's descriptions of a hangover:

There were moments when he seemed on the verge of settling the matter, and then some invisible person would meanly insert a red-hot corkscrew in the top of his head and begin to twist it, and this would interfere with calm thought. Piccadilly Jim.)

Instead of Gandalf-Balrogging, I could just relax my mind and say, "You know what? It just doesn't feel right, so it's probably not right, even if my rationality says it's okay."

And then instead of ghosting, I could simply announce I'm going to bed even though it's only 10:15, accept the derision with whatever grace my six gin-and-tonics can muster, and retire.

It's liberating, in a way. It's not as immediately liberating as ghosting (damn, I loved doing that, especially in my era of youthful excess), but in the final un-analysis, it liberates like only a shrug can liberate. You cease to analyze, you cease quite frankly to care, and just submit to that intuition of what's right and what's wrong.

It's the virtue of obedience, which is the virtue associated with the fourth decade of the Catholic joyful rosary. Maybe it's not the obedience of Joseph and Mary presenting Jesus to the Temple officials, and maybe not even the obedience to God or some other cosmic power. But it's obedience . . . to something, somewhere, and it makes life a helluva lot easier and expends far less mental energy.

And if my intuition here is right, I suspect such an approach helps remove that left-hemispheric eye from the center of our existential face.