Dreamers and Rivet Counters

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me think ‘Hmm…’ and wonder about its wider application. I might be a bit late to the party on this particular volume, but it has made me reflect as just noted. The book is:

McGilchrist, I., The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, Yale, 2019).

The book was first published in paperback in 2010, it seems, but I have only recently become aware of it. It is not a work about wargaming, it has to be said, but it does have some interesting things to say, perhaps, about how we wargame and the diversity of wargamers.

The basic premise of the work, backed up by more scientific data on neurophysiology and psychology than you can shake a stick at, is that the human brain is divided into two hemispheres and that they have rather different takes on the world. The left hemisphere deals with detail, grasps the world, and manipulates it. It is also responsible for a lot of language, although not all, and tends to continue with its own world, rather than take much account of context and what is going on around it.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, is open to the world, to the new, to context and innovation. It handles metaphor, in terms of language, and aims to integrate experience into a bigger picture, one that has depth and perspective. McGilchrist traces these tendencies over the centuries, from evolutionary traces such as the origins of language and music to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution.

The point he is trying to make, insofar as there is one point, is that over the centuries since the Enlightenment the left hemisphere, that of detail and lack of a bigger picture, has slowly taken over dominance. There have been a few hiccoughs along the way, of course, such as the Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth Century but, broadly speaking, the Western world is mostly left hemisphere in its thinking now. Science has made such progress that its method, reductionism, is king.

In reductionism, we break things down into their smallest components and try to understand them. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it does have the unwelcome consequence, in my view, of dismissing anything which is emergent as ‘nothing but’ something else. Hence, for example, ice is nothing but dihydrogen oxide in a certain arrangement. Any other description of ice is simply adorned language and is to be, if not dismissed, then taken with a certain pinch of salt. It is poetry and not science.

That is true, as far as it goes, but in fact, in human terms, what can matter is the poetry, rather than the science. We do not necessarily act on scientific fact. We might even say that we cannot, because we do not know enough about the world. We could ask the scientist who believes only in scientific fact to conduct an experiment to prove that his wife loves him. If he does so, in my view, he may well find that she does not, at least now.

So, to wargaming. You might have wondered what the relevance of all this to wargaming is, and I have been pondering that too. Wargaming is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least in its more popular, more democratic form. Hence it is probably subject to the hemisphere interactions (or lack of them) described above. That is, we, as wargamers, do detail and grasp objects in the world as tools to manipulate that world. Hence the ‘rivet counters’ of the title. At some level we want to determine the muzzle velocity of a Brown Bess musket, or the speed and maneuverability of a FW 190, or whatever. We try to reduce such things to numbers and manipulate the numbers to our advantage. This all seems fairly left-hemisphere-located stuff.

When it comes to the wargame itself we have a slightly different situation. We have to look at the wider picture and integrate. If I believe that my squadron of King Tiger tanks will win the wargame all on their own, I could well be wrong, especially when I encounter an opponent wielding a combined arms force with infantry, anti-tank guns, and their own tanks. The bigger picture, courtesy of the right hemisphere, matters here.

We also have to make things up in wargaming. I have mentioned this before, but history does not deliver all the things that we, as wargamers, would like to know. The left brain is quite good at making assumptions and filling in gaps, but it tends to do so to its own advantage. Thus, for example, a squadron of unknown German tanks is more likely to be represented as Tigers or Panthers rather than Pz 38(t), I suspect. The right brain can more easily dismiss such ideas as fantasy, and bring the projection down to earth by suggesting Pz IIIs for example.

Overall, of course, the idea is that the two hemispheres interact to give as full a picture as they can. In fact, the way they do this is to inhibit each other. The right hemisphere takes in the world and presents it to the left. The left hemisphere works on that and represents its results to the right, which then reintegrates it with the world. Both hemispheres dismiss irrelevant and perhaps silly ideas from the other, focussing on what they find to be important. The problem is that if the left hemisphere becomes supreme, as McGilchrist argues it has, then balance is lost and we are at the mercy of the left hemisphere and its delusions, which do not attach to the world in any particularly meaningful way.

Wargaming, then, as life, demands a balance between the two views. We cannot just count the rivets on a tank and think that our wargaming job is done. On the other hand, we cannot simply keep focus on the big picture ignoring what is happening at the level of detail. But sometimes, it seems to me, we do focus too much on, say, the capability of a particular weapon system at the expense of how, in fact, it was used in conjunction with others.