Truth
Mary Midgley on Scientists
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 04 November 2002
Mary Midgley the Unmerciful
Like a cat, when she stretches comfortable, the claws appear as well.
Andrew Brown, in a Guardian Profile (January, 2001), describes Mary Midgley as “fiercely combative” and as “the most frightening philosopher in the country—the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool.” She is happy to sharpen her tongue and her claws on others, and she is someone “whose wit is admired even by those who feel she sometimes oversteps the mark.” Yet, she seems unable to recognize the humour of others in that she cannot understand scientist’s jokes like, “a physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about an atom,” doubtless a humorous extension of Dawkins’ selfish gene. James Lovelock, a scientist who is a personal friend, says the fierceness of her character seems a purely professional affectation. Um?
She believes that philosophy matters and has, late in life, decided that science is setting itself up as a rival to religion, and she is the white knight who will spear the scientific dragon and save the almost spotless maiden, Religion, from its foul breath. She accepts that science has its place, but it should be securely chained in it, so it cannot spoil childish fantasies, or trouble the comforting memories of fierce old ladies.
She is fond of correcting scientists about the most obvious things that they ought to know! She condescends that modern scientists have realised the urgent problems of the human race, but stupidly think they can easily be solved. She knows they cannot! But Brown says that the “vehement clashes” Midgley is fond of are “not scientific or factual at all.” Midgley misunderstood Dawkins and took offence. Not unnaturally, Dawkins was hurt by the intemperance of what she had written. Brown says it is now a question of academic competence, “part of the war between science and the humanities.”
Concerning competence, she is a bit imprecise for a clever philosopher. John Cornwell, the writer, and director of the science and religion project at Jesus College Cambridge, says she cannot or will not distinguish between scientism and science, and nor does she distinguish differences in the positions of her own critics. What she does is “very good knockabout,” which pleases people who don’t like science. “She’s very feisty,” Cornwall says. Rude is the proper word. He once asked her, in a college bar, about confusing scientism with science. She had around her a set of admirers she had been impressing until then. “Is Cornwell drunk?” was her philosophical reply. “She does go as close to playing dirty as you can get,” Cornwall concluded. Well, since she is fond of dishing it out, frank speaking seems justified in return.
She has an immense arrogance, the Oxonian “effortless superiority” no doubt, at least in her writing. Brown calls it the natural Oxonian self-confidence that learning is important and foolishness a crime, but she adds a belief that the learned are often importantly foolish. Doubtless she will include herself in this assessment with all the insincerity she can muster.
Character
She is the daughter of Canon Tom Scrutton, the chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, and was brought up in a large vicarage, but she denies she is a Christian, saying Christian doctrines are impossible for a decent and educated person to subscribe to. Quite so, but despite it:
It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice.
Not entirely. So what does she believe? Apparently she thinks that organised religion has learned from its own mistakes, a dangerous ledge for anyone to cling to without evidence bordering on certainty. She also thinks that religions cannot be superseded just because we don’t like them. What other reason, then, might allow them to be superseded? That they are false, phony, scams—comfort zones for middle class failures? Not that they are propagating ignorance? All of these are excellent reasons for superseding religion, but the garbage written by the phonies themselves, the theologians and clergy, are supported by the tendentious idiocies of supposed philosophers like Midgley. She might not be a Christian, but her father seems to have impressed her more than she will allow.
Midgley points out that prayer is important, but is not interested in any psychological cause or implications, especially non-religious ones, preferring to imply that it is religious. Brown reports that there is a sense of rather Victorian moral astringency about her. She supports, not only religion but royalty, on the simple grounds that they are better devils than the ones you don’t know. Like many octogenarians, qnd most Christians, she yearns for a time when she could understand what was happening. She prefers pre-Darwinian ideas of human nature to modern ones. She even blames science on to Lucretius! She is, in short deeply conservative, as elderly academics and daughters of Anglican Canons usually are, and so she does not spend much time attacking the real causes of the destruction of the world—corporate bosses and governments. Had she taken more notice of her friends at Oxford, ahe might have done.
As a student before the war, her friends, like the philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdock, became communists, as the logical opposite of fascism, but Midgley was above such a commitment. She also preferred to talk about Kant for five years rather than helping in the war effort by volunteering to be a land girl or a coal miner, as many other women did, undergraduates too. Doubtless she was praying for victory. In short, she is astonishingly blind and complacent about the real issues, and is unself-critical. Brown reports her as having said about the certainties of one her opponents:
It is an extraordinary thing to say of someone that they cannot control a character flaw.
She herself is simply too wonderful for criticism, especially her own. Her pit bulldog attitude reflects her failure compared with her pre-War peers. By growling loud, she hopes to make a belated impression. Her reaction has been to pick on what she considers “soft targets,” as Brown puts it. Science is a soft target because scientists are not a uniform body, more’s the pity. Most of them believe what Midgley and her religious puppeteers and ventriloquists tell them. Scientists are mainly a sad and disillusioned lot, not because of science, which mostly they love, but because society treats them like shit while lionizing those who talk it.
Brown concludes with this quotation:
I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say—and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict—a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesn’t seem to run out.
Quite so, Mary, but the question is who is the idiot?
Scientific or Scientific?
Midgley tells us, in the grandly named Journal of Consciousness Studies, (April 1999), that the adjective “scientific” is often no more than a vague compliment meaning “methodical.” As such it applies to people like historians, linguists, and logicians, implying that these people are not really scientific at all in the stronger sense. The stronger sense is when it is applied to endeavours considered to be science. Then the word is used factually, and one can refer to bad science, and accuse history of not being scientific because it is not included among the sciences.
It turns out that Midgley is looking for a new handbag to swing at the scientists whom she thinks are too big for their boots. She does not like the idea that the scientific method should be widely adopted, and tells us that it all depends on what is meant by “scientific.”
In a digression on self-understanding, doubtless meant to suggest that scientists have none, she tells us:
In the enterprise of understanding other people, cognitive success depends on moral attitude. To get far in this study, you need fairness, honesty, maturity and indeed generosity.
So, to get far in the study of other people you need to be moral, such as being fair, honest, mature and generous. It is a proposition that moral people would doubtless agree with, but which seems unlikely to be true. When honest people study crooks and tricksters, it is often far from easy for them to understand why they are the way they are, but immoral people like them will understand it fully.
So far her tack is not clear but it is nevertheless an interesting one since the people who have traditionally been given the authority to be responsible for our morals have predominantly been crooks themselves, and often murderers. It makes sense that guardians of morals should not be immoral themselves, and observation, not merely philosophy, shows it to be so.
After a few paragraphs of blarney she comes to the conclusion that people take different views based upon their social situation, and each one has a moral imperative or two that determine how they should behave. Thus a world modelled on that of seventeenth-century cosmology…
…does not easily find room for non-rational humans such as babies and can scarcely accommodate non-human nature at all.
Midgley is not talking about Christian clergymen, whose utter disregard for infants, and the parents who had to suffer poverty and misery to support ever more of them, is well known. These same churchmen took almost a thousand years to realize that animals had any worth at all, in the world, they are told by their holy book, they have stewardship over. Of course, the moral philosopher is not moralizing here about the monstrous behaviour of the guardians of morals, but about those who inherited the attitude of the Enlightenment that freed us from them.
Does She Understand Science?
Whatever social outlook is adopted from among those available in the world, Midgley tells us, is no more scientific than any other—meaning that no one is any better than another. Here “scientific” is just a word of admiration, not implying that science has any bearing on them. Yet Midgley seems to be getting her two definitions mixed up, because she then says that even though she has used “scientific” to mean that individual social or moral outlooks cannot be considered more or less better in some way, she immediately extends it to mean that science can have no bearing on them. She seems to think that social constructs cannot be studied by scientific method because “objectivity requires that all observers should abstract from their individual differences.” We all of us have some social and therefore moral background, and therefore we cannot look at human affairs objectively.
Midgley, philosopher or not, is confessing she does not understand science in every word she utters—except when she meanders on to some verdant meadow of blather, when the sense she makes is like muzak in a department store—pleasant but forgettable. Nor are we mistaken in what she is saying for she reinforces it by saying:
Social and psychological theorists who claim to be operating in a value-free vacuum outside morality are notoriously deceiving themselves, not noticing their own biases.
What she says might be true, but it scarcely matters in science which is the result of a massive human endeavour, not just a few theorists. She cites B F Skinner, the behaviourist, who said that human beings should be studied as if they were physical objects, and whatever we might presume as other humans about their subjective motivations should be ignored. That seems quite sensible if we do not want to confuse our own responses with those of our subjects. Midgley finds this reprehensible and morally repugnant, as if Skinner had said that people should be burnt at the stake!
Now, whether Skinner is right or wrong will be shown by other scientists. Many of them have said that Skinner’s methods, while being valuable in drawing our attention the the fact that it is hard for us to be objective about other people, and at the same time that we are equally not getting the whole story about the lives of animals from pigeons pecking at bars, indeed ignore important aspects of humanity. It is hard to believe that Skinner was unaware of this.
Midgley does not get the idea that science tries to understand things separately before trying to understand interactions and the whole. Doubtless she gets the idea of Boyle and Mariotte that by keeping the temperature constant a simple relationship can be found between volume and pressure for a gas. Equally she can perhaps get the idea of Charles and Gay Lussac that if the pressure is kept the same, the volume of a gas is proportional to its temperature. Having found the relationships subject to restrictions, they can be combined in the gas law, and we can freely alter temperature and pressure and still predict a gas’s volume.
Seeking to eliminate extraneous effects to get at relationships is some of what science does. It is not all of it. It is what Skinner was doing. Skinner was probably right that much of what we do is purely behavioural. It might not be the behaviour that make us singularly human, but it needs to be known, if we are to find out how we differ from animals. Midgley’s anger at this illustrates Skinner’s point. An effort has to be made to keep emotions out during the observations.
Lacking the wherewithal to understand that science is a team game which, like soccer or baseball, allows for individual brilliance but ultimately depends upon the whole team, Midgley treats Skinner as if he were the whole of science, and that the whole team of scientists changed their moral outlook on humanity based on his pronouncements. She is really an apologist and like them all can only succeed against effigies that she makes to stick pins into.
Nor does she understand that science is subject to fads and fancies, and that the efforts of the whole team eventually expose false or inadequate fads, sometimes pursued for a while out of fashion. She could have picked on the far better known and exaggerated example of Lysenkoism, a biological fad in Russia pursued for political reasons, and which few western scientists thought had any merit at all. But even the fad for Lysenkoism might have been useful because it proved there was nothing in it. Acquired characteristics are not inherited. There are few psychologists who will say that behaviourism has been useless and should be treated like Lysenkoism. Most psychologists know what Midgley tortuously and insultingly thinks she is telling them. There is more to human behaviour than behaviourism.
In her periodic historic musings, Midgley admits that the term “scientific” meant for all the early Enlightenment thinkers, “thinking out problems afresh for oneself rather than relying on authority or tradition.” They were not suggesting that science would replace outdated methods of thought like theology, but that was merely because they had not yet thought of it. Science had not yet shown how powerful it was, and more important, how successful it would be in explaining things. The social sciences started as scientific in that old general sense of methodical thought, but Midgley recognizes that the growing prestige of the physical sciences themselves meant it would take on the stronger meaning.
Tar Brush Polemics
Turning to the tar brush method of polemic, she tries to blame the science she does not like herself on to ideologists like Herbert Spencer who claimed scientific backing for Social Darwinism, and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who also thought of Marxism as science-based, as did Freud and Skinner of their own work. Ha! It took a philosopher, Karl Popper, to show what science really was.
Now, it is arguable, and has been argued, whether Popper was right to completely discard as scientific these attempts at social and psychological sciences. Most educated people, even many children, know today what science is, and there are few people like Midgley who are exceptions among the learned. But in new fields, science rarely has firm ground to stand on. It struggles to proceed, falling into mud and ruts until a corpus of observation has been produced from which firm ground can be established. It is not always easy.
No one can deny that people like Marx, Freud and Skinner were making observations, and Skinner’s were often pretty impeccable ones. The point of science, though, is to offer explanations that can be tested, and in social studies and psychology that is not necessarily easy to do. Still, even though they were not scientific—or perhaps because they were not scientific—Midgley now gets dewy eyed about Freud and Marx. They were formulating “comprehensive attitudes to life with a strong moral component,” the perfect subjects of abstract intellectualism for a moral philosopher. So, she thinks world views like these should have been investigated, not scientifically but philosophically, of course. But Popper thought enough about science to think that if these attempts were not scientific, then they were merely “metaphysics.” He plainly meant “rubbish,” but Midgley likes her metaphysics, so she tells us Popper only used the word vaguely.
The point of Midgley’s discourse is to defend philosophers and poets against Peter Atkins, who has written:
While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates.
Poets play with words to form verbal illusions that often are quite pleasing, just as a painting is, but ultimately they are ornaments, and might even be self-deceiving. Poets are entertainers who have added little to our understanding of the universe. What has annoyed Midgley is that Atkins adds:
Philosophers too have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets… They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists.
Midgley says Atkin’s “crude view” is not often defended today, but, if that is true, it is because scientists have had all their courage beaten out of them by attacks from empty philosophers, theologians and clergymen, and corporate bosses. All of them blame science for their own failings, while scientists seem too intimidated to fight back, and those who do, like Atkins, are villified.
If we can take it that Midgley is no dunce then we have to conclude that she wilfully misunderstands science and wilfully draws a mischievous cartoon of what it is. She is doing it out of pique. Modern philosophers are a type of scientist. Most scientists, like evolution, proceed incrementally, but philosophers can take longer steps, and undertake grander mental projects, and thus extend their hypotheses beyond those of the scientist.
Ultimately, however, their speculations must be checked in reality, just as the journeyman scientist at the bench does, and, when grand conjectures are utterly wrong, they have to be discarded like the humblest hypothesis. Often the philosopher can think some more and revise their ideas hoping to get then to match reality, and in so doing they are being scientific—in the strong sense. In this way, philosophy can complement science. Philosophers can dare to think what scientists cannot. Proper philosophy is therefore a stimulant for practical science. Midgley is not a philosopher at all. She is a theologian.
