Interview with Mary Midgley

by Sheila Heti

This interview was conducted for The Believer and was published in their Feburary 2008 issue. The version below is longer than what what was, in the end, published, and it is the edit I prefer.

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Mary Midgley lives in a small cottage-like house several hours outside of London in Newcastle-on-Tyne, a university town where she was previously a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (now retired), and where she has written her influential books of moral philosophy. She published her first book, Beast and Man, in 1978, when she was fifty-six. This was followed by eleven others, including Wickedness (1984), Evolution as a Religion (1985), Science and Poetry (2001), and a memoir, The Owl of Minerva. Recently, Routledge has been re-releasing her major works and has compiled a companion, edited by one of her sons: The Essential Mary Midgley. The Financial Times praised her work as “commonsense philosophy of the highest order,” and she was characterised in The Guardian as “the most frightening philosopher in the country… the foremost scourge of scientific pretension.”

In recent years, she has found herself engaged in fierce public battles with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, over what she has deemed their ideological approach to the story of evolution – arguing that they are attempting to do the work of myth-makers rather than scientists. When I visited, she was working on a pamphlet for teachers in British schools, to help explain the evolution vs. creationist debate.

Midgley is a tall, formidable woman. I arrived at her home by train at four in the afternoon and, though I would be staying overnight, she requested that we begin the interview immediately. We spoke for an hour and a half, after which she grew tired. Then she cooked us a vegetarian dinner. When I followed her into the kitchen and asked if I could help her with the preparations, she remarked, very dryly, “It’s no use being helped.”

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Sheila Heti: I want to talk a bit about evolution as the reigning creation myth of our time, and how it affects our idea about what a person is and what life is. In your book Evolution as a Religion, you criticize some scientists for attributing to Darwin’s theory of evolution certain things which shouldn’t be attributed to it.

Mary Midgley: Well, I think it’s a matter of getting the story right and not misusing it, and there are two ways in which the idea of evolution has been misused. One is the optimistic way which says it’s all getting better and better, and we should go along with it – that evolution is a sort of escalator which can take us anywhere. This was Lamarck’s and Hubert Spencer’s view, it was not Darwin’s, but people think that Darwin proved it. He did not. But if we believe this, it produces a belief in progress, which means that whatever we do is better than whatever there was before, and we only want more of it. But the idea that growth – for instance, economic growth – is natural and required – is a mythical idea. This can’t be right, because things do not grow indefinitely; they grow until they’re big enough. Imagery is terribly important, you see. But Darwin didn’t even use the word evolution, did you know that?

SH: Yes, I’ve read that.

MM: And people think this is Darwinism, and that it’s a great scientific discovery. What it is is myth, and if one says it’s a creation myth, I suppose it is, in the sense that it’s one of the stories which different cultures have to explain why things are as they are by saying how they were before. The other main misunderstanding is the one which says that the universe is runby hostile competition between individuals. This is also not Darwin. Herbert Spencer picked it up from the laissez-faire economics of the day which said that all you need for progress is savage competition. The idea was that if you had enough savage competition, eventually things would come right. But this is a fantasy about how life was made, because organisms cooperate constantly. The little bits in our cells were originally separate organisms which settled down to work together. If you don’t have an enormous amount of cooperation of that kind, you can’t have organisms at all. And the sort of “competition” by which they get ahead very often has nothing to do with fighting anything else, but finding a new place. You find a new food source, or you start photosynthesis, or something of that sort.

SH: Richard Dawkins is somebody you often criticize for going too far.

MM: Well, I do find it surprising that Dawkins, for instance, quotes Tennyson at the beginning of The Selfish Gene. “’Nature red in tooth and claw’ represents our modern understanding of what natural selection is,” says Dawkins. Well, it doesn’t! That story about bloody-mindedness is one terribly one-sided story among many that might be told, and one shouldn’t be enslaved to any such story. There are plenty of other ways you could talk, and the metaphors that are being used are powerful metaphors of a nasty kind and are quite arbitrary. They have a very strong effect.

SH: When you look at human nature, it’s so much more complex than just this one myth. What would you say is your view of human nature, as connected with a story or a myth or a structure?

MM: I mean, it is equally misleading to treat people as wholly cooperative – though I don’t know that anybody quite does that – but we do have a variety of different motives. Freud’s simplification was to say we think of nothing but sex, so to speak. With Hobbes it’s all about power. These things are always one-sided. But it does seem to be very unfortunate if a one-sided story acquires the authority of science, because science is meant to be impartial, isn’t it? Scientists as such aren’t necessarily impartial, but the ideology which is boiling out of books of that kind gets sold as science, because the book’s supposed to be a scientific book, whereas the person is really acting as a guru or a prophet who should be judged on the merit of his prophecies.

SH: You have said that many scientists don’t even realise they’re doing the work of myth-makers.

MM: Yes, I think so! And it’s very unfortunate. The education of scientists, particularly in English-speaking countries, tends to be very specialized. They haven’t had philosophy or history in their background. If you are specialized, you have a simple idea of truth as correspondence with facts – but big concepts don’t correspond directly with facts. They are ways of assembling facts. What has often happened is scientists who are scrupulous in the main body of their work, when they get to the last chapter, they have a holiday, you see.

SH: And the debate in America in the schools between what they call Creationism and I guess evolution – could that exist if evolution wasn’t one of the atheist myths of our world?

MM: That’s right – it could not be seen as the opposite of religion unless it was seen as something of the same kind. I think it’s really very very unfortunate what’s gone on. I really hadn’t taken in how strongly American Protestantism had been cut off from the rest of thought. I mean, all these unfortunate early immigrants had a very hard time. They couldn’t have taken very little with them to America except their Bibles. They couldn’t take most of their culture. They just had to leave it behind. A lot of them had been members of Protestant sects, and were persecuted, and their Bible was what they were living by. So when – long before Darwin – people began to be told that the facts were otherwise, they couldn’t take it in. It was not tolerable. And they got into the habit of simply saying, “That’s what the smart-alecks in the town think, the people like the lawyers who did us out of our field.” They got into the habit of regarding it as another tribe’s doctrines, so at the end of the nineteenth century they had formulated this fundamentalist doctrine which hadn’t been ever said before – that all of the Bible was true. I mean, people before that did assume that the ancient history in the Bible was true because they hadn’t anything else to compete with it, but as time went on, people gradually got used to the thought that it wasn’t literally true, and it didn’t have to be. But they didn’t get used to that in the hinterland of the United States. The confrontation now is terribly hard, but it does seem to me that this Dawkins business makes it much harder. And Daniel Dennitt is doing it too – simply saying religion is rubbish, it’s indisproved, it’s time we got out, you know. But you’ve got to try and understand where people are and make it possible for them to take things in, and it’s very hard. There’s so much politics behind it right now. But the idea that science is the only book – that it will supply the meaning of life –

SH: Right, and I mean, the meaning of life – typically human life and humans are explained to us in literature. It’s not in science, it’s not in –

MM: No, no. I mean, big scientific theories do bear on the central meaning of life, but to get factual accuracy in the details of science hasn’t got a lot to do with that.

SH: What does science tell us about the meaning of life? Has it told us anything definite about the meaning of life?

MM: It shows you the sort of order in which you live, doesn’t it? I don’t feel that it’s a total waste of time. Curiosity obviously is a human attribute, and people often do spontaneously wonder, “Why is that frog green?” or something of that kind, and they find the answer and they think, “Ah, this is satisfying.” So it’s something about finding an order where you previously didn’t. This makes the world seem a little more akin to you, a little less alien, and if someone’s a dedicated scientist, I think he is pushing back the frontiers of our understanding in a useful sort of way. It’s not a matter of vast metaphysical truths, but there’s a continuity between science and the big questions about life. I mean, Copernicus – it’s quite interesting to think, “Is life different now that we know we’re not in the middle?” Well, yes it is, but of course that’s not just science, that’s also philosophy.

SH: There’s this thing people do – which is compare humans with machines – and you’ve written that the only reason we can plausibly do this is because we’re animistic. We look at computers and invest them with human qualities and can’t see them as completely impersonal – and that if we could see them as they are, we wouldn’t be drawing these analogies. I wonder why you think people like to use this metaphor of the human being a sort of computer.

MM: Well, that’s interesting. There’s two ways of looking at it, isn’t there? Whether you concentrate on us or on the computers. First, for a very long time there has been a romanticising of machines. And the suggestion is quite often made that the world will be much better place when these things take over because they’re much more sensible than us. You’ll see these solemn arguments to prove that computers will shortly succeed us, and it seems a point on which people don’t think very clearly because their imaginations get excited. So machines become a kind of magic which will remedy the ills of human culture, and the fantasy is that the mess humans make can be avoided once these robots get here. And we’re wonderful because we can make these things which are going to be greater than us. Then there is the other side, where you think of people as machines, which behaviourist psychologists very much like to do, and you have only to engineer the machine a little bit differently and society will be greatly improved. That’s a different angle, isn’t it?

SH: Yes.

MM: I suppose they’re both power fantasies. Certainly it’s an area where all kinds of plots and plans emerge. I regard it on the whole with gloom, though. I like Frankenstein and I like good science-fiction, but when people who are merely being sensational want to get an excitement out of this relation, I don’t attempt to care for it.

Sheila: Yes, yes. I wanted to bring that up because in Evolution as Religion you write about how we misunderstand DNA, and we believe think that we can sort of tinker with our DNA, we can take genes and replace them with other genes, and that this is a misunderstanding of how genes work.

MM: Yes, there is the temptation to regard human beings as one more machine in the garage, which you can sort out by suitable tools. It’s perfectly clear that what led people to first suggest the idea of genetic engineering is the thought that people could be made like cars and could be altered easily and conveniently. This is simply false. When people suggest this, they are exaggerating their power and exaggerating their knowledge. Science obviously has made progress by thinking of human beings as assemblies of parts in this sort of way, which is fine as long as scientists don’t overdo it and become unrealistic.

SH: In what way have they become unrealistic?

MM: Well, the hope of dealing with mental illness entirely by physical means, which psychiatrists have been very dedicated to. The idea that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, something floating on the top, and you can always get it right by suitable drugs is wrong. I remember hearing a psychiatrist here saying what a sad thing it was that Virginia Woolf couldn’t have suitable pills, for she would have got straight quite easily. It’s obviously much easier and less disturbing to the people who have to do the work to think that there’s a physical process they have to carry out, and if they haven’t found the solution yet, they soon will and everything will be quite all right, than it is to have to enter imaginatively into the state of the people who are in trouble. I think people are frightened of considering feelings and letting their imaginations loose on what’s going on inside. They find it much less frightening to get out the spanners. So it’s a very understandable kind of illusion, but it really is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics, this idea that consciousness is just an effect and never a cause

SH: Well what would you say against the person who said that if only we had the right pills, Virginia Woolf could have been saved?

MM: Well, it’s assuming that depression is something like maybe TB, a physical illness which can be totally cured by a physical remedy, and that would seem to be extremely unrealistic. Of course, sometimes anti-depressants do cure things completely or even partially, but so many illnesses have both mental and physical sides. It’s pretty clear that indigestion and asthma are partly mental things, because those who have any of these kinds of complaints know generally well that they get worse when one is worried. And there’s no reason why that should not be so, because consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon. Are we onto that side of the mind-body problem now? It has been really medical orthodoxy for the past century that consciousness could affect anything physical. If you find a mathematician who’s working on a problem, it would be rather odd to say that the thoughts that he thinks don’t actually affect how his hand moves. I mean, this is all fairly simple isn’t it, but it has been sort of systematically ignored.

SH: You’ve written about Atomism and Lucretius, and you say people wouldn’t have done the explorations they did, had the story not –

MM: Yes! This is the thing that struck me as extremely interesting, cause I was reading the scientist who said that poetry was a waste of time – and it just struck me that the atomic theory, which is now fundamental to science, came in the first place from the Greek atomists, who were philosophers, and it came via Lucretius, because Lucretius’ poetry is so impressive, you know? He was indeed very much admired and read in the Renaissance when people began to build the atomic theory. I mean, the shape of our imagination determines the kind of scientific theories we can hold, doesn’t it? And our imagination is of course is exercised in all kinds of ways in ordinary life, but literature is its stamping ground. Poetry is tremendously influential. And another example of this lately– some scientist dismissed Shelley as a beautiful but ineffectual angel standing in the void in vein or something, but in fact that revolutionary stuff was enormously influential. His conception of society and how it required equality and how bad it was, and his kind of atheism was very impressive stuff. I think he had a lot of effect on changes in the kind of science that we do, and this does become clearer because in the 17th century they were really moon-struck by clockwork. They thought it was absolutely gorgeous – it was a sort of miracle to them, because they weren’t actually engineers themselves, they just saw these amazing…! And so mechanistic science, the notion that there were mechanisms in everything took over, and did jolly well for a time, but eventually physicists began to realise that actually the tiny particles that are inside everything are not a lot of little balls banging against each other. We don’t live in an enormous car, so we need other imagery, and Einstein and so on used other imagery, and now people say it’s fields or it gets much more abstract. So what I’m on about is that mechanical imagery was there because it was obsessing the society at the time, and peoples’ imaginations were full of it, and when peoples’ imaginations move onto something else, they use something else. And yes, it’s clear that when evolution came along, yes, this economic determinism – theories about the brass law of wages and that kind of thing – free enterprise, capitalism that went with it – that was very strong, and that was what caused people like Herbert Spencer to say the world is essentially run by competition. It was that model being projected into the science. He wasn’t a scientist himself. It was the imaginative pattern that determined the shape of the scientific theories. There’s nothing kind of wrong about that, it’s bound to happen, but one needs to be aware of it. And it does mean that you can’t treat science as infallible, final truth.

SH: Right now I think a lot of the imagery comes from the internet and the idea of interconnection and do you know much about Wikipedia?

MM: Yes, yes.

SH: I think that’s a really interesting social model in which there’s no one author and we’re all the author.

MM: Yeah, that’s right. Well, when monarchical models are not at all fashionable now, are they? Networking is a great pattern at present. And I suppose that ought to help, but the trouble with present-day science is it is rather authoritarian, and big science is run in such large chunks now, it tends to be funded by industry much more than it used to, and there are these great teams in which work gets done. Darwin wouldn’t have got anywhere today. Nobody would listen to this country gentleman. He wasn’t part of some big organization. And James Lovelock produced Gaia on his own, and he called his memoir, The Life of an Independent Scientist. He has very firmly remained outside but he’s been working very hard, and he’s managed to finance himself by making inventions, but not everybody can make inventions that they sell.

SH: Well that’s very interesting – the idea of Gaia. And I think it’s probably a necessary antidote to the idea that we’re essentially competitive creatures. How would you sort of crystallise or describe Gaia?

MM: Well, and it’s also an antidote to the idea that we run everything, that the earth exists for us and it’s simply a lot of resources which we can use exactly as we please because human begins are the only thing that really matter; we’re the end and everything else is the means. That has been a very powerful notion in our culture, and is quite unrealistic, biologically. It seems that by now the scientists have mainly come round to the Gaia idea, which is that earth and the things on it are a self-maintaining system – that living things have always have worked to keep the atmosphere and conditions on earth suitable for life, and that there are limits to the conditions in which they can do that, so if you disturb the thing it doesn’t work so well for us. I mean, the thought that we ourselves are only a little bit inside a great concern or organism like that is far healthier, and it’s also true that it is – or should be – an antidote to the extreme individualism, because the social Darwinist idea that by everybody fighting things will come right is not how nature works actually, and it’s not only true of human society that it doesn’t work very well, but also by relation to the other organisms doesn’t work very well. Yes, the imagery of the earth as a parent or mother is indeed very contrary to the thought of this red in tooth and claw. Now, there are limits to using any of these images, but the one is no more superstitious than the other. But scientists don’t like the idea of Gaia. They like the science of it now, but they don’t like the imagery of it, but they do like the imagery of the selfish gene.

SH: And why do they not like the imagery of Gaia?

MM: I think they find it embarrassing because it’s personal, and they don’t want to have to engage in anything like that.

SH: You use the word imagination a lot in your writing in a very – you give it a lot of weight – but I don’t feel the general use of the word imagination gives it much importance.

MM: No, you’re quite right. I do it deliberately because of that. If one thinks what’s imaginary is not real, so to speak, or if by imagination one just means having fantasies about something, that wouldn’t do. But Coleridge and Wordsworth got this right for us, didn’t they? They said there’s a fancy, which is just for fun, and the imagination which works. Itis the form in which our feelings go through to our thoughts by recollection – emotion recollected in tranquillity. You can’t, as it were, use raw feeling directly. It’s got to be processed and brought into relation with the rest of your life and made into thought and then it will come out.

SH: A lot of my friends are artists – either painters or writers or musicians – and when I talk to them, most of them seem to feel that this is not important work to be doing – maybe they should be political activists, and I wonder if you think there’s something about the times we’re living in that would cause artists to think that way?

MM: What’s wrong with doing both? I mean, there’s a bit of time left over from writing and painting.

SH: Well no, I guess more the problem is they don’t even see the value of doing artistic work. Like a lot of these people do do political work, but they say the artistic work is just selfish, so there’s a devaluing of the artistic work.

MM: Well, that’s wrong, isn’t it? Even when you are saying things which you mean to have a political effect, the imagination is a terribly important organ. Prometheus Unbound is really Shelley’s dramatisation of the revolution he hopes to follow from the French revolution – you know, from the liberation of mankind. Most of his writing is more or less about that, and he was a tremendous inspiration to people in the next generations – and Blake too. It’s a matter of putting in some explosives somehow, and if those people hadn’t been terribly concerned about social conditions, they wouldn’t have written it. I think if you can get through to other people and enable their vision of the life around them and make them say, “Ah, I see something,” then you’ve done something of absolutely first-rate importance, haven’t you?

SH: I guess. I wonder, is there any characteristic in humans that makes you most optimistic about the way things can go in the world?

MM: I wouldn’t say I’m particularly optimistic about the way things are going to go in the world at present. But I mean, humans are much more versatile and spontaneous and liable to pop up with something new and different then the theorists are suggesting. When they are confronted with difficulties, I think they deal with them amazingly well. I was struck with that in the war. People got cross, but then very quickly they would devise something – they are extremely inventive. I’m sure people are at their best when things are hard. And then if you give people everything, they start behaving very badly. Quite a pity.

SH: There’s a great deal of interest in our culture in curing oneself by going to a therapist, and I know tons of people who go to therapy and psychoanalysis, and I wonder what that says about our concept of the human – that we all feel like we have to somehow cure ourselves.

MM: Well, we are social beings, aren’t we? And we do constantly interchange thoughts and feelings with those around us. If there’s something wrong with our thoughts and feelings, it’s not strange that we try talking to somebody else. In any culture there have been people provided who will do this or that. That we look for the remedy in talking to someone – well, if one says that’s odd, at least it’s better than just shooting people, is it not? There’s other alternatives which would be worse.

SH: Yet I wonder, with so many North Americans feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them – is it really possible that that so many people right now have these big psychological problems that prevent them from functioning, or is there something else going on?

MM: Well, I think there’s considerable difference between different countries. I mean, I think there’s more therapy per square inch in the States, isn’t there?

SH: I think so. Particularly in New York.

MM: Would it not be sensible to say that any country composed by immigration is importing an awful lot of problems? I mean, your parents came from Hungary, people come from all kinds of places. It’s a terrific operation to shift oneself, is it not? And then, because of that, there’s a great emphasis on the need for success. The fear of getting stuck in that great chaos at the bottom is terrible. So people are competing. I think in most other societies people grow up a more cohesive group.

SH: But psychotherapy seems to exacerbate the isolation to an extent, with this obsessive focus on the self.

MM: I’ve never been happy about one-to-one therapy, because it is so isolating. I have a friend who works in group therapy, and that’s obviously difficult, but it’s obviously a more healthy and nearer to the ordinary human model. Whereas the more separate we try to be, the more we each get left with our own problem, don’t we?

SH: Yes. You talk a lot about how there’s too much emphasis on individualism and not enough on working collectively, or being part of a collective, or being someone who can be useful to other people, and I think that to focus on one’s own issues and sickness, as opposed to whatever cultural issues and sicknesses there might be, kind of blinds one in some way.

MM: Yeah. Well, you know, when war is declared, suicide stops, so to speak. Depression goes down. When people feel more unified with their group, many of their difficulties are resolved. There’s something very demanding about the degree of independence which we’re supposed to have in modern society.

SH: You’ve written that we should consider ourselves liberated and not imprisoned by the fact that we have one personality or one character our entire lives, and I wonder how it’s liberating to be just one person, to have to deal with one –

MM: Well, this is interesting, I think the puzzling thing about human life is that, to start, one has an enormous range of possibilities, but by choosing anything actual you cut out an awful lot of the others. But I think being actual is rather important. If somebody were to say, Well I want to keep all options open, so although I like music very much, I’m not going to spend very much time on it because I want to do all these others things – well, you’ve still chosen. You’ve chosen to be a jack of all trades – and that’s a good choice, but you are notnow that very specialized musician. This isn’t a deprivation, really, not really, because you couldn’t be everything at once and be one person. I see that it may be a little odd to talk about it as a liberation, but I wish to deny that it’s a dreadful deprivation. You see, Einstein ended up rather bad at the violin. I don’t know what would have happened if he’d stuck to it, but I don’t think it’s a tragedy. The liberty todo the thing that you do do, actually and properly, seems to me to be the important one. Yes, this is something that interests me but does not horrify me. How do you feel about that?

SH: I don’t know. Well, I always feel like it’s sad that I can’t be other people –

MM: Yes! Ah!

SH: Like I would love to experience what it feels like to be another human being.

MM: Well indeed, that’s indeed very interesting, and I think yes, you’re right that one deplores the limits of one’s own experience, that’s right. But if you went round madly trying to have everyone’s experience –

SH: No, or even just one other person’s experience for ten minutes.

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SH: I understand that you didn’t start publishing until you were fifty.

MM: That’s right.

SH: And you wrote somewhere that it’s a good thing because before that age you wouldn’t have had anything to say.

MM: I wasn’t confident enough in what I might have said. I think it’s terribly hard that young academics are forced to publish all the time, whether they know what they want to say or not, and I think it often happens that people are rather slow to form opinions, but anyway it certainly did happen to me. I started writing some magazine articles in my fifties, and eventually did more of that and it went into books, but yes, I did not have the confidence and I think a lot of people don’t, and if you’re forced to commit yourself when you haven’t really got the confidence, you’re inclined to shout too loud. That’s probably what I would’ve done if I’d thought to do it earlier. You get yourself into a row that you don’t need.

SH: Would you say that the experience of raising three children helped your mind?

MM: Greatly, yes indeed, they’re very educative things, our children. And I really hadn’t had anything much to do with them before, but one thing which I became clear to me at that point was that they are not blank paper at birth. The behaviourist idea that everything’s conditioning was quite strong at that time, and I think that I rather assumed it, but when you have particularly not one child but two and it turns out quite different with the second one, you think, Gosh, where is all that coming from? Yes, I got a much more realistic idea about what human beings are and how they start. It is so surprising how much comes with the clay. It’s very cheering.

SH: I really liked your book, “Can We Make Moral Decisions?”

MM: Oh yes, you came across that. It doesn’t get sold very much.

SH: It’s very interesting, and I wanted to talk to you about that, because you said in the beginning of the book that you see a generational difference – you were talking about your students at Newcastle and how they have this additional problem, which is that they don’t feel comfortable judging.

MM: Yes, yes! Terribly conscientious about it. They were terribly ashamed. [big laugh]

SH: What do you make of that?

MM: Well, when they think of moral judgements, they’re thinking of judgments made by self-confident people of other people who they are not bothering to understand. They are not thinking, for instance, about when you’re judging what you’re going to do yourself. This is not an intrusion. And if a friend comes to you and says, “I really don’t know what to do about this,” and tells you the story, you aren’t going to say: “Well you mustn’t do that.” You’re going to say: “Well I do see the advantage, but I wonder about…” You’re going to help them in the making of it, and you’re going to have to make little moral judgments on the way.
[laughs] I mean, I don’t think it’s hard to sort this one out, but I suppose a point that one should discuss is it’s not actually an injury to be judged. If somebody forms an opinion about what you’ve done, they have a right to do that, so to speak, and it shouldn’t kill you.

SH: How is it not an injury to be judged?

MM: If you tell me what you’ve done, it’s not an injury that I form an opinion. Is it? We have to think, “Is that right or wrong?” Because if we don’t have any sort of range of examples, if we can’t form opinions about what anybody’s done ever because we’re being so jolly careful, we don’t get our standards, do we?

SH: True. I think this is a particularly contemporary, North American thing, like maybe one doesn’t even want to think about standards and values, because it's more comfortable to say, “Let them do what they want – I’ll do what I want.”

MM: There’s certain matters in which this is suitable, and there’s other matters in which this is not. If we’re getting into paedophilia and kidnapping people and killing them and so forth, you’ve got to have an opinion, don’t you? Haven’t we sorted out Mill “On Liberty” yet? It seems to me he did the job pretty well. If what people are doing doesn’t hurt anybody else, probably it’s no one’s business to interfere, but it’s not always easy to be quite sure that it doesn’t hurt anybody else. And he did regard morality as it were as a social mechanism for keeping things right – and that’s a pretty modest way of regarding it. It’s not that you think you’ve got access to supernatural or unnatural qualities to say something’s right or wrong – it’s a social remark. Of course, what tends to happen is that people, when they’re very young, have this really excessive fear of forming any opinions at all, and then after a while they feel that isn’t working, so they jump over to being rednecks and know everything. [laughs] It’s always so hard, isn’t it, to stop in the middle. Somebody said to me once, “Join my society for the dumping of pendulums.”

SH: For the dumping of pendulums?

MM: Dumping of pendulums – stopping them – yes. Yes.

SH: Hm. What about judging oneself? What criteria do you feel is important for a person to use in determining whether they’re good and acting well in the world?

MM: C.S. Lewis says somewhere that a man is not usually called upon to have any particular opinion of his own merits. That seems to me to be right. I mean, you need to make judgements about which way to go and which life to live and which person to be, but I don’t think they’re about giving yourself marks, are they? There is something that a Buddhist group that I went to used to say, and I thought it very sensible – that the Christian emphasis on sin was really rather mistaken in that it caused you to keep on thinking about yourself. Lewis is very strong on this I think. Have you read him?

SH: Yes, I’ve read him a lot – I find him veryinteresting.

MM: He’s very good. He said humility is not clever people trying to think they’re stupid.

SH: You ask in your book about making moral decisions, “Why aren’t we more aware of our conceptual needs?” You say that if somehow something is going wrong – if the system in our head by which we explain the world doesn’t match up with the world – or is too limited or too one-dimensional – or if the ideas conflict with each other – then it’s an important task for the individual to try and sort these things out. One should take it seriously.

MM: Yes, look at free will for instance. A lot of people are very confused and unhappy about that, aren’t they? A lot of scientifically minded people think we haven’t any, and then they go on as if they had it. I mean, this seems like a noxious statement. It’s what I mean by the term “philosophical plumbing.” That is what we must do. People go on with a bad smell for a long time and don’t take up the floorboards, and then they get upset if somebody mentions –

SH: That there’s a bad smell.

MM: Yes. You see, the theme of that book is, Why bother to do philosophy? But teaching it, one really does encounter many students who are suffering considerably because they’ve got beliefs that won’t mesh, and in those cases, simply saying, “Well how about defining this? And do you really mean that?” can do quite a lot of good. I wish that a bit more philosophy was taught simply for that purpose. You see, we started talking about therapy. Well I think often that’s what therapy is.

SH: I’m curious – I haven’t noticed in your writings whether or not you have a feeling for there being such a thing as a God in the world.

MM: Well, I’m rather puzzled about this, Sheila. I should explain that my father was a parson and I was brought up in an Anglican background. I always thought this stuff was all right, but I could never get any impression of God being there. I think it is very puzzling that some do and some don’t have this kind of experience, and I’m prepared to believe that the world is big enough for both. I mean, it seems to me if there is anything out there, it’s much too big for us to be able to think about it clearly. But I think this obviously is a terribly important human concept and human experience, and it is ludicrous to try to amputate it as if it was some kind of tumour. The visions of the imagination are a crucial and real part of human life, and what is operating there is real. What’s your situation about all this?

SH: I don’t know, I mean I don’t believe –

MM: You were brought up without it now.

SH: I was brought up to think that anybody who believed in God was an idiot –

MM: Yes, yes, that’s the way to start, I think.

SH: Really? So now I’m much more sympathetic to religious people, and I have a very strong feeling for, There’s so much that we don’t understand, There’s so much mystery – but I don’t know that I attribute that to a single creator.

MM: Well, I think not knowing and regarding it as a sacred mystery is entirely proper. I’m sorry to be unhelpful, but that’s what I always have to be at this point, yes.

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