Right-Brain Rules?
Dan Pink's book on the Conceptual Age, A Whole New Mind, is imminent in the US - and some excerpts are already appearing. Here's one from this month's Wired, called 'Revenge of the Right Brain'. I've read it, but I'm humming and hawing...
Not sure about the 'how to keep America first' tone of Pink's arguments in this excerpt - ie, Westerners should make a bolt towards developing the intuitive, creative, pattern-recognising 'right-brain' aspects of themselves, as all the logical, rational grunt-work tasks of the 'left-brain' are being outsourced to India and China. Is there something of the 'information coolies' about all this - let's dump all the form-processing on those eager Orientals? (See Hari Kunzru's excellent novel Transmission on the ironies here.)
And will Pink evince any awareness of how Eastern traditions of spiritual practice have been dynamically balancing, and not evaluatively loading, left- and right-brain dimensions for thousands of years (see books from Hampden-Turner and Danah Zohar on this)? From this, you'd think he might:
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
Yet when he says, "Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper", it's the ghastly f-word which strikes me as a sign of some shallowness. Can you note approvingly the rise of our "inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence" - and cite yoga as evidence for this - and still talk about 'foreigners'?
I began to muse on this at the end of the Play Ethic book (see the 'PlaySprituality' strand on this blog). We should be aware of the limitations of our Western, modernistic models of play (autonomy plus imagination, essentially) and not presume that the 'MTV mindset' is the only vision for creative living. A 'conceptual age' on a global level, in short, will probably also have to be a 'spiritual' age too - or at least one that is happy with multiple truths, pathways, and lifestyles.
Pink says his scheme isn't 'manichean'. Have to say, though, I prefer the good old ying-yang (and even Escher's loops) to the dualism of the graphic illustrating his article anyday. Hoping a read-through will be less disheartening...
