Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the philosopher Mary Midgley. For the last 30 years Mary Midgley has been one of Britain's leading moral philosophers. She has been called "the most frightening philosopher in the country" as a result of her ideas and the acuity with which she defends them. Her work is chiefly concerned with the role of science in our lives; whether human nature exists, and if so, what it tells us about ourselves; the concept of wickedness; and the part that art and religion have to play in telling us about human behaviour and experience.
Mary was born in 1919 in Greenford, the youngest of Cannon Scrutton and his wife Lesley's two children. She was educated at Sommerville College, Oxford and after university began working as a lecturer in the philosophy department at Reading University before moving to the University of Newcastle. She married Geoffrey Midgley, also a philosopher in 1950 and they went on to have three children. Her first philosophical book Beast and Man was published in 1979 when she was 50. Since then she has continued to publish books on a diverse range of issues. Now 86, Mary continues to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the home she shared with her husband Geoffrey, who died in 1997.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams Book: The Variety of Religious Experiences by William James Luxury: A solar hot water system
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Hello, I'm Kristy Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
The programme was originally broadcast in 2005 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. .
My castaway this week is a philosopher. Philosophy, she believes, is like plumbing. You take it for granted until it goes wrong. Born at the end of the First World War into a free-thinking intellectual household, she went just before the Second World War up to Oxford, where she became a friend of Irish-American.
Murdoch and she resisted joining the Communist Party. Marriage and motherhood in the north of England followed and it wasn't until she was 57 that she published her first book.
For thirty years she's staked out a philosophical position all her own, arguing that life is complex.
There are no simple answers to its problems. Morality depends on unresolved contradictions.
Discipline, not even science, can provide a perfect solution. These are the arguments not of a narrow academic but of a fierce academic approach.
And witty woman who gleefully declares that she keeps thinking she has nothing more to say and then finds, as she calls it, some idiotic doctrine which I can contradict. She is Mary Midgley. You contradict Mary with great style.
Well, it has to be said you've been called the foremost scourge of the scientific pretension and the most frightening philosopher of the century. Are these titles that you enjoy take some pleasure?
No, I get a little worried when people talk of me as an instrument of destruction. I think the trouble is that the destructive things I say are rather simple and when it comes to construction that's always more...
More complicated. But what are the sort of idiocies, the idiotic doctrines that you attack? I mean, give me a flavour. What characterises them? Well, I think that they are extreme and overconfident. They usually have some sense in them but are being exaggerated and people are over-advertising them as the cure for everything. I mean, the notorious example is that I got very upset about Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene because, although I think he meant that to be, as it were, a biology textbook, it actually radiated very strong and simple views about human nature, a suggestion that we are basically selfish and nothing else. This isn't supposed to be what the book says. The book is supposed to be.
To be about the way genes behave, but if you use such a word as selfish, inevitably you set going a tremendous natural simplification. And people did like it. I mean, we are beguiled by big ideas, aren't we? That's the point. Absolutely, but particularly if they're melodramatic, you see, if they sound exciting like that. And it lays a responsibility, I think, on all of us who are writing not to oversimplify. Well, it's very hard not to oversimplify, and I think when I'm being treated, as I say, as some instrument of destruction.
I'm being oversimplified, but I can see why it happens. Well, I mean, let's take your... it's not a complicated analogy, actually it's a simple analogy for a complicated concept, which is that you are trying to understand life as looking...
Into a large aquarium, don't you? A rather murky aquarium. Yes, a murky aquarium with very many windows. A great big aquarium. You can go round to all the different sides of it. You peer in one side and you see a fish swim away. You go round the other side and you're not sure if it's the same fish. I mean, obviously what I'm talking about here is understanding other people's points of view and getting the range of a problem. We'll come back to it all, but tell me about your first record now. Well now, this is Farnes and Swann and this one is of course relevant to my career because it's about moral philosophy. It is the reluctant cannibal.
And it's about what happens in a cannibal tribe when a child starts not obeying its elders and questioning the existing values. Come and get it! Roast leg of insurance salesman. A chorus of yums ran round the table. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Except for Junior, who pushed away his shell, got it from his log, and said... I don't eat people. Hey! I won't eat people! What's the matter with the lad?
eating people is wrong. Eating people is wrong. Flanders and Swan and the Reluctant Cannibal recorded at the final performance of the Fortune Theatre in London in 1959. Cast your mind back, Mary. Can you pinpoint the moment when philosophy...
First came into your life in the sense that you recognized it as such? Well, I have the notion that I first heard the name, one thing that struck me very much when I was quite small, five or six. We moved to a house where there was an extraordinary sort of hump in the garden outside the study window. And my father explained that the parson who had been there before had been sitting at his house.
Study window and he'd seen an elm tree begin to sway to and fro. And that elm tree had finally fallen the other way and this was the root that remained. So as my father commented, being a philosopher, he just sat still and waited. Well, I thought that's rather splendid, you see.
Like to learn to do that. But there was a lot of chatter going on around me on serious subjects and I did vaguely gather that this some of this might be called philosophy and I thought
Quite interesting. This was in Greenford. It was more a rural place than the sort of part of the West London
for all that it now is. Oh, it was indeed green for a day. One has to say, nostalgically, it was then country and my brother and I potted around looking for newts in the ponds. An enormous rough cut.
This was around a sort of dilapidated vicarage. That's right. Dilapidated vicarage had been patched up but it was dilapidated when we got there. And your father was a bit eccentric. I gather he ended up...
Up at Speakers Corner shouting the answer. Well, he was eccentric in the sense that he had liberal views. He was a pacifist because in the First World War he'd been a chaplain and had been required to explain to soldiers why they were dying and that put him pretty much against war. But I wasn't suggesting he was eccentric because he was a liberal thinker but he did stand in the town square, didn't he? That's right. He would put a chair in the marketplace after evening service and he had some boards painted, 'Please question your rights.'
person and people would drift up and say is every word in the Bible true? No, you would say the Bible is a lot of different books, you know, written for different purposes and so forth and they
The other thing they always asked was why has the Archbishop of Canterbury got 15,000 a year? And the answer is he's running an office, you know. He doesn't spend it all on drugs.
I mean a lot of these things were jolly obvious but they were real questions. People were simply wondering and wanting to know. And he wanted to help and he wanted to communicate, he wanted to give practical help, he wanted to help them think. Which is probably where you got the idea. I think so indeed. Record number two. Ah yes, my father who had quite a good baritone voice used to sing some baritone songs and this one I think is ever so good because it's both very jolly and very sad, you know, Schubert manages to be both these things at once. Let's have it.
♪ Mustering, sodding, sodding ♪
♫ Und erlich mein Hälz, mein Hälz ♫ ♫ Nung jag die Postr und aus der Stadt ♫
Schubert's Die Post sung by Peter Schreier, accompanied by Andras Schiff. You said, Mary Midgeley, that you were a clever but rather chaotic child. You were sent off to boarding school to Down House near Newbury, weren't you, where you seemed to have been encouraged to tackle abstract thought at the drop of a hat. Pretty fearless stuff. Well, we were given practice in the questions in general papers.
They were things like, and I remember two particularly, one was 'Nature is badly lighted and too green' discuss.
And one was attempt, by definition, an example to explain the word work.
But these remain with you afterwards, you see. The meaning of the word work still seems to me to be very...
Is it work? So we've got the brain working, that was the point of it wasn't it?
made you think? Absolutely. Because at first sight they're pretty daunt and nature is too green. You think whatever could I say but then you start yes yes well come you know you get started. But there was a certain teacher wasn't there who encouraged you to sort of think out of the box. Oh yes when we got to the sixth form stage particularly the history teachers Jean Rountree and Ben Sanderson really were interested in the background of their subjects.
But she knew Miss Rountree. She made a large error with you, didn't she? She certainly did. Jean Rountree was extremely keen on me knowing German and that wasn't a bad idea. So in February 1938 she said she thought it would not be too dangerous or foolish to go to Vienna. Well, she was, unfortunately, mistaken. But you went? I went and sort of settled in with a family called 'J. Rosalem', a delightful people. A Jewish family, that's all. That's right. And I arrived on the phone.
Of March, and on March the 14th Hitler came in. And so there one was in Vienna with the stormtroopers going... And you understood because of Miss Rountree's current affairs lectures, you knew exactly what was going on. You must have been terrified. It wasn't sort of totally unexpected, but it was very bad. How nasty did it get? Oh, well, I mean, I didn't see anybody being killed. I saw the crowds in the Ringstrasse all yelling, Sieg heil, sieg heil! and doing their Hitler salutes. And Jewish shops...
Were being smashed, you know, written notices up. You would have been, what, 17? About 17, 18? Yes, 18.
Well, I did know already that that's what the world was like, so to speak. It was not exactly surprising, but it was as bad as one would expect it to be.
What about the Jewish family you were living with? Well, they got out in the end, after a few months. But the father was arrested, wasn't he? The father was arrested and I went...
Oh, Frowie Rislin sent me, asked me to go to the Quakers to see if they could help and there was nothing I could do. I think, I thought that possibly by staying I was some sort of protection to them. But you were very distressed, were you not? Of course, yes, yes, it was horrible, yeah. Record number three.
Oh yes, now we're at Down House. Every summer there's a great Beano as there is at most schools, and the Beano included a sort of ballet taking place.
The ballet which was being rehearsed all my last summer at school was Pierre Ginte. My form actually were just trolls, you know, nothing terribly ambitious in the dancing line but this theme of Solveig's song has remained with me ever since.
Solveig's song from Grieg's Peer Gynt, sung by Elizabeth Söderström with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davies. So you got a scholarship up to Somerville, Mary. One of your contemporaries at Oxford, Philippa Foot, also a philosopher, has since said that you cut a very grand figure indeed. Philippa tells me this and it's a...
Comic because I thought Philippa was terribly grand. You know how inferior one feels to everybody else. But what you've been talking about, sort of intellectual superiority, were you very intellectually self-confident? No, I wasn't. But I mean, I suppose there was this, that at Down we were very much in the habit of arguing about these vast themes. And I do seem to remember somebody at Somerville saying in a rather irritated manner, Oh, here's somebody else from Down who knows all about everything. Not that we...
Thought we knew, but that we were used to chatting about it. But of course there were fewer men around when you were there because it was 1938/39. Well, by the time the war got going there were very few men around, but when I went up in '38, you see, the things were kind of normal. But was it ultimately a disappointment or an advantage that there weren't men around? So many men around. Well, it caused it to be much easier, I think, for us to get our mouths open and speak.
Classes. And you see, I think that this is why a number of us who were up at Oxford at that time have made ourselves known in philosophy. There was Philippa Furt, there was Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Bonac, and a few others. There have not been so many in philosophy.
I mean, proportionately, I think. Iris Murdoch was there, of course, she was a contemporary, and then became a great friend. She was your bridesmaid, wasn't she? Yes, she was. She was my bridesmaid. Iris and I piled up very quickly. I found Iris very soothing and easy because, rather rarely among us when we first went up, she wasn't self-conscious. She wasn't thinking, Oh dear, I'm not good enough. What will anybody think of me? She just went ahead and said what was in her mind, and I took to her very much. And we remained extremely close. And the main sort of obvious difference between us was that Iris joined the Communist Party almost at once.
I was always dubious about it, having been reading my news dates when I knew about the treason trials in the 1930s and so forth.
Ideological dogma at first hand. Absolutely, but you see, it's hard to sort it all out, and I think it was hard to believe that there wasn't somewhere somebody who was right and was going to do justice on the
But it's that same theme, isn't there? That there aren't any big simple answers, you know? There you are then being conflicted by all of these different views and trying yourself.
Find a middle line? That's right, that's right. I mean, Iris came out quick after the war, much quicker than most of the intellectuals who went for Stalin, which I think, you know, does a person credit. Record number four. Yeah, now this is a bit of Benjamin Britten's serenade for tenor, horn and strings, which I think is an absolutely splendid collection of songs.
The bit in question is, is the like-wake dirge? And it's the bit where you're told what will happen to you after death. If you don't do charitable good things in this life, you will get a pretty bad time. Here it comes.
♪ Come, stand, march, and cry, Jesus ♪
The dirge from Benjamin Britten's serenade for tenor, horn and strings with Peter Pears accompanied by members of the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten.
Oxford Mary went to Reading and then to Newcastle eventually having married your husband Geoffrey but leaving on
Oxford was a positive act on your part. You said you would have been destroyed if you'd stayed. You seem to be saying that it was a very negative atmosphere, it was a very critical, destructive atmosphere. I think what was going on in moral philosophy in Oxford at that time was terribly narrow. And at that time, if you raised questions in Oxford or Harvard or any of those places, which were actually moral questions about what it was fair to do in the world, you know, about should next be done about race or something of that kind, you would have been told that this was not philosophy. This phrase, It is not philosophy or has nothing to do with
philosophy was constantly used and was used to sideline these immediate practical topics. Do you think that's still the case in high-flow academic circles? Well, I fear that it has to be, and there's something at present which makes it almost have to happen, which is the insistence that all academics should produce a constant stream
Of articles and small... - Papers of one kind or another. - Yes. The survival of their department...
And depend on the sheer number of articles and the number of words in the articles that they bring out. It is a strange obsession with product, I think, that this notion of accountability that you've got...
Hold everybody who has office to account and instead of producing educated students the thought is you produce a lot of pages covered in words.
Ah, now, yes, we come to Anna Russell explaining Wagner. Now this is a product of real enthusiasm for opera, which my husband Jeffrey had and which I shared, in which indeed we got very interested in Wagner and we think he's bloody good on the musical side and indeed his ideas are very interesting. But if you look at the myths in any literal sort of way, you can keep from laughing and I think...
I think Anna Russell has explained extremely well how this works. The scene opens in the River Rhine. And swimming around there are the three Rhinemadans, a sort of aquatic Andrew's sister.
It's a tune is as follows.
I won't translate it because it doesn't mean any--
That was Anna Russell attempting to explain Wagner in part of the Ring of the Nieblung,
The town hall New York in 1953. So married life and motherhood, Mary Midgeley, took you over. You had three sons. You juggled with the philosophy as well and wrote some papers and articles and lectures. But true to the views you were just expressing, you didn't write your first book until you were in your late fifties, I think. Beast and Man. You simply don't feel you'd have been capable of writing it before you? Yes, my views weren't clear enough. What really made it all come together was that I got passionately interested in animal behaviour, in the accounts given by people like Jane Goodall and Konrad Lorenz and others of how animals actually behave. This was news to me and seemed terribly exciting because the way the animals behaved was actually not the rather ludicrous sort of way in which we tend to assume that they behave. The wolf is wicked and the rat is vicious and so forth.
But much more complicated and much more like ourselves. So this seemed to put us much more in the world. You see, I had not been aware of it, but I'd had a thought that we were sort of way above the natural world and not screwed on to it, and I began to think that we were screwed on to it. That's how it all kind of came together. But it was ultimately to put you on a collision course, if you like, with the evolutionists and notably the one we've mentioned.
Richard Dawkins, who argued that science has most of the answers really to our behaviour and determines what we do and when we do it and how we behave. Yes, I think that science simply is much more complicated than that really, but there's something very good in what Dawkins says in that he is keen to point out that we humans are part of the whole life system, that we are animals along with the other animals. This is a very good and important point which he has always made, but the trouble then I think is that he's putting both us and the other animals in the same place.
In a vast bracket of being selfish and I think that is most misleading and not at all scientific. There are those of course who say that you misunderstood his use of the word 'selfish'. Um...
He chose to use that word about genes rather than saying something like they are self-perpetuating or prolific or something of that nature.
Kind, and it is so highly coloured a word that he cannot possibly complain if people take it literally, but also he himself takes it literally quite a lot of the time.
In the book. When Hobbes talked like that, saying that we were all solely self-interest, he was doing it for political reasons. He wanted to stop people being ordered by the church really. And if you put the thing out explicitly as a political
and then people know where they are. But if you say I am a scientist and I'm telling you this, you see, it really gives you an authority which you didn't ought to have. That's what got me upset. Yeah, upset is the word. I mean, you had a huge sense of outrage.
I mean you expressed it very strongly and in a very articulate way but I have to say if ever there was a slap down that was it wasn't it? It was intended as such yes. Number six. Yeah well now this is Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. I have no special excuse at all for bringing it in I just think it's an absolutely splendid and very soothing piece of music.
I think it does us all good. Let's have it now.
Part of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, played by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. Mary, you've lived in this society for, may I say, more than eight decades now, and let me ask you then, from that experience and as a moral philosopher, what's your judgment about us today as you see us struggling to legislate, if you like, for decent behaviour with ASBOs, for example, antisocial behaviour orders? Do you think you can do that? Well, it's difficult, isn't it? I think, really, that the increase in social mobility, the way in which everybody is surging around and not living with people that they know very well, makes it all much harder, and I don't know how much can be done.
This. I mean when people used to be stuck in the same village all the time of course things went wrong and people treated each other badly but still you did know all the people who you were concerned with and people do tend to treat those they know better than those that they don't I think. It's not to be expected. So are these the kinds of price we pay really for being more affluent?
And more liberal and more equal and more free and more independent? Yes, I think so. Some sort of balance has to be arrived at if you haven't yourself been brought up with any kind of, as it were, habitual...
Discipline, it's very hard to learn it when you've grown up, so I think that there are great difficulties.
Organized society you do have to impose some sort of order but it can
very hard. On the other hand if you think about it we we taught people how to how
Behave in a racist manner by introducing a Race Relations Act, didn't we? That worked. That's quite true, so the law sometimes does work, does have a role.
Job to do. I'm not against some sort of legal arrangement but the aspect of… But you want to legislate against the individual thing rather than the person. That's what I'm thinking.
But I have no bright suggestion of what to do other than that the balance really does need to be attended to and that simply trying to scare people is not necessarily going to work. Record number six.
This is the Swan of Tuonela. It's a Sibelius piece. My husband played the Coron play as well as the oboe so we used to hear this rather splendid
Thing pretty frequently. If you have an oboe in the house, as those having one will know, there's a great deal of upset going on because the reeds are never right. It is an endless business to get the oboe, the cor anglais, actually on form.
But we will now hear what it sounds like when it is.
Part of Sibelius the swan of Tuanela played by the Vienna film on
conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. And what about God, Mary? In the main, the evolutionists don't allow a place for him, do you? Well, I think all that is too narrow a way of talking. If we can go back to my aquarium, we look through all sorts of different windows and through some of them this large fish…
Sometimes called God is visible and through others it's not. Have you seen him? We would be mistaken. I think the flick of a tail, my feeling is that the personal God I do not personally meet but I know a lot of people do and I think this is a puzzling and mystifying fact.
But as most of those who are much concerned with him say, he is a mystery and you shouldn't be surprised that you don't exactly get the hang of it. I do think that this is important to say because the suggestion of some Darwinists
The old armandists today is that we know that life is meaningless, as it were, that we know that it kind of random and doesn't fit together and that seems to me to be...
Absurdly pretentious kind of suggestion.
Sense of order in the world to have a faith in humanity. Yes, and beyond humanity in life.
I mean, we should be on the side of life, shouldn't we? Not just humanity. The notion of Gaia is one that I fancy, you know, that the Earth and the living things on it form part of a system.
Called faith isn't it? Well I never mind if you call it faith. Yes I think so. Last record, something's quite relevant at this time.
Ah yes, yes now this is Mendelssohn's Hebrides over to Fingal's cave. Now by good luck my son Martin and I went to Fingal's cave and it is...
Absolutely wonderful. You come towards this island and you see what looks like a cathedral, two great arches on the side of it, and you see that this whole island is made of hexagonal pillars, and it is absolutely
gorgeous, we were dumbfounded. Now it's a thing that I only just heard about and I think it's good fun that when Mendelssohn went there long ago he came back absolutely bubbling with this music that he was...
To write, but it was the Sabbath. He was staying with the strict Presbyterians who would on no account let him touch the piano until the following morning. So it was only then that he was able to put down the music which we shall now be hearing.
The end of Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, Fingal's Cave, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Hightink. Now Mary, I have to ask you three questions if you could only take one of those eight records.
Which one would you take? - Oh my, I think it has to be Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Talies. I think that's a kind of all-purpose one, you know, that would always make one feel better,
And a book you can take with you as one of the patrons of Shakespeare. Ah, no, yes. Here are no trouble. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This is 500 pages long. It's bound full of excellent stories about people's different religious attitudes and what got them into them and out of them, and the thoughts that he has about them.
Them are jolly interesting. I know that this will work because last summer I was actually quite ill and I was convalescing and I thought, 'Oh dear, what am I going to read?'
I know I've got War and Peace but it won't last me until you see the whole of August. And I took this practice of religious experience off the shelf thinking it was pretty good and indeed it is absolutely marvellous. You can read it many times without the slack.
It's trouble. And a luxury. Ah well, my sons have pointed out to me that I'd better have a solar or hot water system. I think that is... Endless hot water. Yes, I think so.
Mary Mitchell, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.
to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.
Transcript generated on 2024-04-27.