The indigenous critique and the divided brain hypothesis: Ideas to postpone the end of the World

Abstract

The voice of Indigenous intellectuals on the conduct of the European conquerors, whenever and wherever in the Americas it has been recorded, consists of a thoroughgoing critique of the Europeans’ genocidal and ecocidal proclivities. In recent times, the voice has taken on apocalyptic tones, emphasizing that the West’s chronic disregard for nature imperils all of us, with Ayton Krenak’s eloquent appeal for ‘ideas to postpone the end of the world’. An astoundingly similar critique of the modern Western World’s mindset based on neuroscience comes from the Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, whose Divided Brain Hypothesis proposes an explanation for what the West has become: an existential threat to human survival. Others such as Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, Bateson and Harries-Jones, have put forward ideas which align with this hypothesis, but the present essay brings these two currents together for the first time and proposes that it was the West’s conquest of the Americas – its people and all their relations and onto-epistemes – that was a key factor in normalizing this mindset. To extend the metaphor, the conquest of the American hemisphere by the European hemisphere normalized the conquest of the right hemisphere by the left.