Joe Rogan, Left-Brain

Or, why he doesn't know who Hegel is

In case you missed it, last week Joe Rogan (biggest podcaster in the world, kingmaker who arguably nudged Donald Trump to victory) had one of his signature 3 hour rolling conversations with Wesley Huff, a Canadian New Testament scholar and evangelical Christian apologist. It gained a lot of traction on evangelical Twitter, and it was actually quite wonderful to see all the tribe’s factions uniting for once to roundly praise Huff's performance. You can watch the whole thing here:

I said to my brother, a long-time Rogan fan and not himself a Christian (though he is now a reader of this Substack—alright bruv), that Huff is probably the person most like me that you'll ever get on the Joe Rogan Experience: an unashamed but chilled out evangelical, riffing on C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, very into ancient civilisational weirdness, and who has apparently rewatched the cult documentary Wild, Wild Country an unhealthy number of times. A notable difference is that Huff is absolutely jacked (probably another reason he vibed with Rogan). I, alas, am not.

Many are taking Huff's interview, and Rogan's sincere openness to his perspective, as the latest sign of a “vibe shift” in attitudes toward religion among many intellectuals and cultural influencers. I touched on this recently when writing about re-enchantment and Rod Dreher’s recent book Living in Wonder:

Rod’s overall thesis is one that I agree with: that disenchantment (if it’s even really possible) is unsustainable because it is spiritually exhausting for both individuals and societies, and so after a century of trying it out people are now looking for re-enchantment.

Rod’s not the only one banging this drum, as followers of The Discourse will know. In his corner too you’ll find Justin Brierly’s Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God and his Daily Wire Bible series, and a steady stream of high-profile conversions among public intellectuals and celebrities, to take just a few examples.

It’s Kind Of A Big Deal that the most popular podcaster in the world exposed over 4 million people to an extended conversation about the historical reliability of the Bible last week. That wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago.

But Rogan’s place in the vibe shift is different, it seems to me, to a lot of the other big players involved in it, especially those in the “re-enchantment” ballpark (e.g. Peterson, Tom Holland, Paul Kingsnorth).

To understand the difference, it would actually be helpful to think about one of those players: Iain McGilchrist.

Something of a polymath, McGilchrist brings together skills in psychiatry, neuroscience, and literary criticism. In 2009, he published The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In 2021, he released a follow up, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, a 1,579 page tome costing £80 when it was first printed by an obscure publisher and which was a pain in the arse to get a hold of for a good while.

McGilchrist's big idea is a development of the familiar "right v. left brain" dichotomy. The left hemisphere of the brain is typically associated with logic, sequencing, linear thinking, facts, maths; the right with imagination, big picture thinking, intuition, artistry, creativity. We might typically call a computer science nerd left-brained, a fine art student right-brained.

McGilchrist rubbishes a lot of the oversimplified pop psychology versions of right v. left brain thinking. The distinction, he says, is less to do with two different ways of the brain working than it is to do with two different ways of seeing. Dan Hitchens summarises it well in an excellent overview of McGilchrist's work in First Things:

Properly understood, the difference between right and left has more to do with two ways of seeing. It’s the difference between explaining the joke and getting it.

…

And yes—to deal with a final pedantic objection—both hemispheres are involved in everything. But McGilchrist presents a mountain of evidence that the left hemisphere is most skilled at mapping and manipulating things, at “building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick.” The right hemisphere experiences the world more fully: It can recognize a face, tell when someone is lying, pick up new skills or absorb new experiences, discern the moral of a story, rest in ambiguity and mystery, maintain a sense of self. The left hemisphere narrows its attention to an intense focus on what can be divided, categorized, and put to use. The right sees the context, the bigger picture.

McGilchrist takes this psychological insight and applies it at the cultural level: the rationalistic post-Enlightenment West has become a left brained society, semi-lobotomising itself by shutting of its right hemisphere. And it has suffered on a grand scale in all the ways that you would imagine if the same thing happened to an individual. In the metaphor of his first book, the left hemisphere is ultimately meant to be the servant and emissary of the right. But over the past few centuries, the servant has killed the master and gleefully skipped off into the resulting anarchy.

The "religious turn" we've seen of late—the rise of Jordan Peterson, a renewed appreciation for Christianity's cultural influence, high profile conversions—are generally seen as a reclamation of the right hemisphere (or rather, of the right hemisphere, master that he is, reclaiming us). We have been starved of meaning and narrative under secularism, and are hungering once again for something more.

And so, given that that's what's selling, one might expect the biggest podcaster in the world right now to be among the born-again right-brainers.

But it dawned on me whilst watching the Wesley Huff interview that Joe Rogan is a thoroughly left-brained guy.