NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews

Mary Midgely

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/05

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/05

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Midgley Title:

Interviewee’s Mary Sex: Female forename:

Occupation: Philosopher Date and place of birth: 13th September 1919, East Dulwich, London Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: curate Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 17/04/2015 (track 1-4), 11/05/2015 (track 5-9)

Location of interview: British Library, London

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 9 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 9 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 4 hrs. 16 min. 31 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Mary Midgley Page 1 C1672/05 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could I start by asking when and where you were born please?

1919, in East Dulwich, a part of London where my father was then a curate.

And I know from reading your autobiography that you spent a short time in Cambridge very early on.

That’s right. The first things I can remember are from Cambridge. I have a vague impression of Cambridge. And when I go to Cambridge it looks a bit familiar, you know. And I was there from, about six months or something, to five years.

[00:45] I wondered, at one point in your autobiography you talk about a family acquaintance who put a sort of, brace of rabbits in your pram, and you were very hard to console. And you say that this wasn’t a memory, but something that someone had told you.

I think it’s… No, I was told it by other people. Yes.

Yes. I was interested in who had told you that story.

Oh, one of my parents told me, my mother told me. I’ve no doubt my nurse told me, because she had had the pram out, and, it was an obvious thing in those days, if you had got, been shooting, [laughs] that you would hand over some, you see. [laughs] I can’t think who it was that we knew that shot rabbits, but somebody did. Yah.

And you suggest that this might explain your dislike of fur in later life.

Yes. I had, for a long time, I mean, and to some extent still I dislike fur, you know, it gave me the horrors. So, that probably accounts for it. And my parents thought it accounted for it.

Mary Midgley Page 2 C1672/05 Track 1

And, another thing which you say is that, the teaching of drawing that you had, and in particular of perspective in drawing, led you later on to like to look at things from different positions, or to appreciate the difference in looking at things from different positions.

Yah.

Which raised the question of, how you think about the influence of your childhood generally on you as, as an adult. What kind of, I suppose it’s a sort of philosophical question really, what sort of idea of the self are you working… when you think about the influence of childhood on you as an adult?

I can’t give you anything terribly general about that I think. I can only say that there isn’t, I think, any particular strong prejudice so to speak. I had quite a nice time as a child, and I wasn’t thinking [laughs] what an extraordinary life I have. in any kind of way. It seemed to me to be a normal, normal way to live, you know.

[02:49] Thank you. Could you, could we go straight… Because, as you say, your memories of Cambridge are vague, could we go straight to Greenford?

Yes.

And, to Greenford rectory, where your father worked next.

Yes. And I wonder whether you could say more about, give us more descriptions of the way in which you played with your brother in the sort of disused farmland with neglected buildings that surrounded the rectory.

Well, I’m sorry to say, it was all fairly straightforward to me. [laughs] Yes, we moved into, I do remember moving into this house, because it was something bigger and grander. A big garden, rather neglected, where we could play as we chose, and we went into the neighbouring fields as well. So, there was a lot of space, and, I was just thinking there, saying these days that it’s good for your health if you got messy Mary Midgley Page 3 C1672/05 Track 1 when you were young. Well I did. You know, we were very very much into mud pies in the garden [laughs], and, it’s a rather clay-ey kind of neighbourhood, Greenford, and was muddy. And the… Yes, from time to time we had floods, so, we were aware of the possibility of flooding. My brother was usually around. We did not see many other children. There were some who we played with, and after a bit we went to school in Ealing, both of us, so we began to meet other children. But, my parents hadn’t friends living immediately around, so, it was in a way a slightly isolated childhood, which accounts for us reading a great deal. I realise not everybody does. [laughs]

Yes, you say you read especially when your brother went away to, to boarding school.

Yes. Yes.

But do you remember particular things that you did, in this landscape with your brother, particular games? At one point you mention a, a penknife, and, you also mention, let me see, pampas grass, which you said was good for darts and plumes.

Pampas grass. Very good, yes.

I wondered what plumes was.

Oh, do you not know the plumes on pampas grass? Yah, well I mean you, you can pick these big, flower stalks really, off the pampas frond, and you can throw them. They, they act as spears, really good, because they flew [laughs] as directed. We were being, I have to say, cowboys and Indians a lot of the time, we had suits for being cowboys and Indians, and threw these things about. We had a rather good swing down the garden on a tree. I’m sorry, it all sounds to me so obvious, but I can’t pick things out very easily. I mean there’s nothing, I don’t think there’s anything dramatic about it.

I think it’s, I think it’s of interest to people listening now, because it’s a kind of exploratory play that children often don’t have now, so…

Mary Midgley Page 4 C1672/05 Track 1

Well I think so. I think we were lucky, not only could we potter around the local fields, we could go further, we could go and find ponds in which there were newts and we could catch the newts. And this was absolutely a matter of course. If you wanted to wander across any piece of country, mostly you could. Yes, and it was very important to me, yes.

Were there other adults in the landscape walking about that you interacted with while at play?

I’m saying, not very many, because my parents’ friends were not local; they gradually got to know people of course, and they… but mostly their friends were either in Cambridge or London or somewhere else. So, there weren’t a lot of influential adults at that point I think. The school did, of course.

[07:15] And, in terms of character, personality, how were you like, and how were you not like your brother Hugh?

I think he, somehow, was always rather frightened of life and particularly of people. And I wasn’t. I think, I mean, an older child often does have that situation, don’t they. But I particularly remember at some point, he was teenage, we were being told that somebody, some visitors were coming. ‘Oh God, not another!’ says Hugh, you see. He was a bit like that. And he remained a bit like that, although he, you know, was quite a successful director of art galleries in his later life. I didn’t have that trouble, I was always quite pleased to see people and talk to them, unless they frightened me in some way, as they sometimes did.

[08:15] And how were, how were you and your brother treated differently, if you were treated differently, by your parents, on account of he being a boy and you a girl?

Oh no, I don’t think there was much, certainly not much objectionable sex difference made. Both my parents’ families were already feminist, quite keen. I don’t mean that they’d been suffragettes, but they, they felt strongly about the education of women. Mary Midgley Page 5 C1672/05 Track 1

And both my aunts, my father’s sister and my mother’s sister, went to college, that is, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, and it was taken as absolutely obvious that that’s what you would do. So that was always a help to me I think, that there was, there was no, no put-you-down. That’s obviously not getting to the point of what society as a whole was thinking at the time, but it certainly affected my, my personal life, it being taken for granted that you could have what everybody else had. [laughs]

[09:27] As you became an older child and could follow sort of, what your parents were saying on this sort of thing, what did your mother and your father actually say directly about that, about the education of women, about employment for women and so on?

Well I think the topic probably did come up from time to time, because there would be issues. Yes, I don’t actually remember. There was a great row in Cambridge, wasn’t there, when Cambridge first tried to give degrees to women in 1927 or some such time. Yes, my parents were certainly aware of this, and they thought it was pretty awful. Oh yes, I do remember that my… Let me get this right. [pause] I think it was at that time that… Yes, my father, being in Cambridge, came across a number of older dons – I think I put this in the book, didn’t I? – discussing the prospect of women having degrees, and was shocked and appalled at the way in which they were telling dirty stories about the Newnham and Girton women.

No you didn’t. No.

Well, I do certainly remember that, only, he obviously was still moving… Yes, I don’t know, it was when we were still in Cambridge, and still moving at King’s, among the older dons. And he said it was astonishing, and he was appalled. And that was typical of how he would be so to speak. [laughs] My father’s, if you get into the question, my father’s family, it was traditionally liberal, and traditionally, rather revolution… a bit revolutionary, you know. Yes. So, I mean his father was very keen on Irish Home Rule, and such things, and, so this sort of left-wing politics was a standard that was going on amongst us, much more with his family than my mother’s I think, they weren’t so political.

Mary Midgley Page 6 C1672/05 Track 1

When you say that he heard that the dons were making up stories, what would that involve?

Well they were passing on dirty stories about what the girls, the undergraduates at Newnham and Girton, had been up to. It was, it was mythology, do you see, about what happens if you let women into academic life.

So was there sort of, stories of sexual behaviour and that…?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean this is perfectly clear, isn’t it, I… I don’t have any more details, but that’s what he said. Yah.

Mm. Thank you. Yes.

I mean he said, dirty stories about the girls at Newnham and Girton.

[12:26] Thank you. Could you give us a description of your father to start with, sort of physically, how you remember him looking as a child, at this age?

Well, he was a tall, upstanding, quite impressive fellow, with a good voice. [laughs] He had been intending to work, to go into the law you see, and it’s clear that he could have done that, and he could do the church, you know how the church and the law and acting overlap in families. He had this good capacity for self-expression. [pause] He was actually rather shy about, you know, as soon as you get on to something a bit more complicated, but he could, he could talk with anybody quite easily. And I think he was, he was quite good at being tactful in public life, in what he said to people. He quite quickly got himself onto the Ealing town council, because, he was appalled at the conditions in Greenford where… You see London was spreading, all these little houses had been put up everywhere, very cheap, and there was a notice, and I remember the notices up that it would be £5 down to get a house for £600, or something of that sort. And you see, people did this, and I’m saying that there was a lot of flooding. It was altogether, pretty awful. So my father got himself quite quickly onto the Ealing town council with a view to doing something about that sort Mary Midgley Page 7 C1672/05 Track 1 of thing. And, yes, I suppose, I suppose I’ve known quite a lot of people who go in for these sort of things since. I think, yes, I say, he was quite tactful about it, he knew, he knew who you could say things to and who you couldn’t. He, I think he probably did quite well on the Ealing town council, for the time. And, he was, yes, I mean he was fine at home most of the time. Sometimes he would be, he would snap. And at that time, yes, once… You see, you were meant… If you did something wrong, you were meant to be sent to your father’s study and your father would tell you why this wasn’t a good idea, and would smack you. But this maddened me, I thought it was most unfair, [laughs] and I didn’t like it at all. I don’t think it suited him either, but it, it was what he thought fathers ought to do; undoubtedly his father had done to him. [laughs] I don’t suppose anybody gets sent to their father’s study now. There was a bit of that, there was a bit there. But it didn’t, it wasn’t a sort of central, it wasn’t a kind of Jane Eyre situation at all. [pause] And, we went to school of course, and then school occupied us a great deal more, and I suppose, yes, we, our misdeeds were dealt with more at school than they were at home. [laughs]

[15:51] When you say that he was a bit shy when it got on to more complicated things, what did you mean?

We couldn’t ever talk much about feelings, and, and didn’t, and didn’t try to. And, yes, I think he was a bit embarrassed, particularly by children. You see, both, my parents had married rather late, they were both in their thirties when they married. I don’t think he had been used to direct contact with small children. I did feel he was just, at that point, distanced for quite a time. [pause] And I suppose that was the expected conduct of somebody who had, training to be a lawyer so to speak. I, I don’t suppose it was exceptional, but it was quite marked. One did feel, if I’m going to tell anyone about this, it had better be mother, you see.

[17:00] In that case, what can you tell me about the sort of conversations you did have with your father when you were a child?

Mary Midgley Page 8 C1672/05 Track 1

Well, he was very… If he was feeling reasonably chatty, he would talk about all sorts of things. You could ask him things, and you would get a sensible result. But I mean, one thing that was always marked about him at home, he had behind him, in the dining room he had the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and after a bit his parishioners gave him the Oxford English Dictionary, volumes of, the whole volumes, do you see. He always looked thing sup, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do, actually, and one would get into, all sorts of information because he did that. And I mean he knew that was a thing to do, if somebody mentioned hippopotamuses, you look them up, you see. [laughs] And he, he knew, as I said, a lot of things. This question of evolution comes up from time to time. Was there any conflict between, as it were, Darwin and the Church? No. Long before we arrived, he had already taken in that evolution’s all right, it does not have to conflict with anything central in Christianity. And he was very interested in that, and he would preach about that sort of thing, about how people mistakenly supposed that religion prevented you believing what everybody else believed. And I picked that up very early I think. So, I, I never lived with any sort of conflicts that a lot of people get.

[18:50] Do you remember what his views were on the reasons why religion – sorry, religion and evolution, were often opposed in the way that people thought?

Yes, I think he knew what’s wrong with, what do you call them, fundamentalists, yes. And this was a fairly central topic with him. He used, as I’ve probably said somewhere, to stand on a chair outside the church. Now this was, started, I think, when he went to Kingston, but he did it somewhere in Ealing. He would have notices up saying, ‘Please question your parson’. And he would invite people, and he said, the first thing everybody asked was, why has the Archbishop of Canterbury got £15,000 a year? And the second thing they asked was, did God create the world? you see. So he was always correcting the fundamentalists, their notion of what you had to believe, you see. I mean, should we go back with him, I mean he, he wasn’t, as I say, an ordinary parson. His father was this liberal lawyer who didn’t care, go for religion at all, so he was brought up with very little. And somehow in his teens he got religion and got it very seriously. Now I should have asked him more about that, I don’t know the details of it at all. But he obviously had a pretty thorough conversion about that. Mary Midgley Page 9 C1672/05 Track 1

And his father expected him, as I say, to become a lawyer, and sent him to Cambridge to read law, and then took him into his chambers. But he, my grandfather, never talked to him about it. This is where the shyness that’s endemic in the family really comes out. He didn’t know how to talk to his parents – his children. And although he was expecting this to happen, he didn’t do it. [pause] Yes, I mean that does contrast very strongly with the enlightened views that he had on all sorts of public questions I think. He, he just left it alone. So, my father at the age of twenty-five or six went to his father and said, ‘Look, I really don’t think I’m going to be a lawyer. I would like to be a parson.’ ‘Oh,’ said his father. ‘All right.’ [laughs] You see, and they never discussed it. And there was quite a gap between, they never really went on talking much at all. So here was, you see, three generations of very articulate people with quite different responses to families, and I think it is quite interesting, it seems to me, I can kind of imagine from my, saying this about my grandfather, I can imagine more clearly the sort of messes which many famous people got into, but as you read their lives, I don’t know if this strikes you, that when you’re reading people’s lives, you keep thinking to yourself, why can they have got in that mess? And, simply not communicating, not communicating with children particularly, I think is a very powerful thing. [pause] Yes, and I, I mean, it’s only an isolated story, but, I may have told it somewhere, but, when my father was at public school, Charterhouse, he had occasionally lost his pen and he had occasion to put down on the bill, a fountain pen. And, nobody said anything at the time. But the next Christmas, the others all got their presents, and he got a bit of paper, now, saying, ‘To Tom from Father, one fountain pen, with love’ you see. [laughs] This kind of thing, takes you right back doesn’t it. But the sort of formality of a lot of private relations is a very influential affair. And I think, you see, that, my father really had seen through this, he was trying to not do it, but he still found it a bit frightening to talk to, to his children and to other people who he was supposed to be near.

[23:37] What do you… Do you have any thoughts about what he was afraid of, what the shyness consisted of?

Oh. [pause] I suppose it’s always having to review one’s inner life, isn’t it, or being confronted with other people’s inner life, which you don’t want to think about, you Mary Midgley Page 10 C1672/05 Track 1 know. They might let you know that they had doubts about the whole situation, mightn’t they? [laughs] I think you’ve probably got more background about this than I have, so to speak, you must have been interviewing lots of people. And, when somebody is shy with you, I don’t think you have a specific thought of what it is that they fear you might do, but you withdraw, don’t you, you get onto a more sort of, impersonal, outside relations. Yah. [pause] Yes, he got better as time went on, he got better when he was older about that. [pause] Yes, I suppose if one thinks about these Cambridge dons, that was a whole sort of, monastic subculture, wasn’t it, old chaps. [pause] I’m sorry, I’m trying to remember something. [pause] No, I don’t think it’s relevant. [laughs]

OK.

Yah.

[25:36] Were you present, then, when your father, in various places, was standing on a chair, answering questions?

Yes. Yes yes.

Can you tell me more about what you remember?

Well, this is when we were in Kingston, where went to when I was about, fourteen. I… Well he would, he… You see people would, people would pop up with this, the Archbishop, why has the Archbishop of Canterbury got £15,000 a year? He was very good at making up the relevant answer. He knew what they were talking about, and he could explain. I think he, he really did rather a good job, both as a town councillor and as a parson, and seeing the point when people disagreed with him, he knew roughly what was going on. I mean this was never embarrassing or anything, he did it so well on the whole. And he wasn’t pretentious, he didn’t pretend to know, he didn’t know. And, I mean, when things came up about the Bible, he would quite quietly explain that this is a lot of different books from a lot of different places, and you know, nobody expects it, you don’t expect it all to agree. And, he could make that Mary Midgley Page 11 C1672/05 Track 1 clear to people. So I mean I grew up with a very good education in that sort of thing I think.

Do you remember, do you know why he did it at all?

Well, because, he knew jolly well that not many people were coming to church. [laughs] He wanted to bring the discussions out to them. And it would be partly things about the Bible and so on, but it would also be political things, about peace and war and, so on. I mean if we’re getting on to him, I think the central fact of his life, and I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere, that, a young parson in 1916, he was sent to the front, and he found himself there having to explain to dying men what they were dying for. And this was an absolutely central fact of his life, you see, the bringing together of the whole fantasy about war with the facts. [laughs] Fantasy and reality affected him profoundly. And, I don’t know if that same thing happened to a lot of other people. I haven’t heard of other people to whom it did happen, there must have been some. And the whole business of chaplains is pretty odd isn’t it, you know. [laughs] What are they supposed to do? But I mean, I suppose in a way it’s part of the fact that, you know, human life is extremely imperfect, and we know, Christianity doesn’t deny that, it rather insists on it. You know, we’re in a terrible mess here, so, some of the mess would involve our doing things which are really contrary to our principles, and this is a sort of central problem of life.

[29:05] Mm. Thank you. And, and do you remember in particular, are you able to give us a sense of the amount of questioning that he got on the religion-evolution question, to give us a sense of, at this time, in Kingston, say, in the mid-Thirties, a sort of, I don’t know, if we could sort of quantify the extent to which people were thinking about this question at the time?

Yes. I, I suppose, in quantity, he must have had more questions about what’s the Church, what’s the Church up to, and the Bible, and so forth, than he did about the conflict with science. But, I think he had probably, in the course of every such session, you see, they’d happen on Sunday evenings after church wouldn’t they, in the course of every such session there would be one if not two questions of that kind. Mary Midgley Page 12 C1672/05 Track 1

Yah. I mean it was taken for granted that science and religion are contrary. This was all caught up, wasn’t it, and kind of invented really in the 1880s, [laughs] you know, before that, all parsons, all the scientists, half the scientists were parsons and half the parsons were scientists, and people knew this as something they had to see to. But it was in America, wasn’t it, that the sort of, movement for promoting science against religion started. At that time of course they had the kind of religion that they needed to do it about with Andrew Dickson White, who else was there? There were several prophets in America who cultivated this. And it did go, it became quite, it became quite a strong view, and it has remained so pretty much to this day, hasn’t it, that people think religion and science must be contrary, and science, science means particularly evolution.

What I’m interested in is where the people who came and stood and asked questions of your father in Kingston, where their impression of the opposition between science and religion has come from.

Well, I think they had probably picked up some of this sort of atheist propaganda, hadn’t they, which is the sort of ancestor of the Dawkins business that we have today. You wouldn’t have necessarily read a whole book, but you might have read a whole book, or you might have just seen the title, you know, or, picked it up through your friends. And I think in sort of, pub arguments, that, [laughs] this was often taken as a theme to argue about, wasn’t it. I can’t give you any more detail, or say who they were. Obviously they will have been people who, who were slightly priding themselves on their education or their, the breadth of their knowledge or something. So, he was occupied, and I guess every other parson who paid any attention to the matter was occupied by… I’m trying to answer this, and, and trying to bring it within the scope that you can talk about, and, if it’s treated as a, simply as a feud, then you aren’t going to get any, get anywhere by talking about it, are you, and I think that probably quite often happens. But it is quite, I mean it is a bit complicated if you start saying what you think is really the meaning of creation. Of course we didn’t have, we didn’t have the Big Bang in those days [laughs], did we, but, but still, there was a clash, a bad clash, but the… And people, people had, I think, drifted out of understanding Bible stories, as they should do, symbolically, you know, the ability to take things symbolically was, was kind of dying out, because, the insistence on literal Mary Midgley Page 13 C1672/05 Track 1 interpretation of science was getting quite strong, and that, that was, I suppose, a serious problem at the time. It’s a problem, an educational problem, you know, why do we bother reading King Lear? It isn’t true, isn’t it, you know.

[34:03] Mm. You also said in the autobiography that, as well as being questioned, he was occasionally heckled. What was the difference, and what was the content of the heckles as…?

Well the heckling is, not just asking questions, but going on pressing them, isn’t it, in a way that obviously happens a great deal in political discussion. And, I don’t know that there’d be anything [inaud] about it. It, it depends on the temper in which people are getting into arguments altogether isn’t it, and, they have the feeling that this is, what they objecting to is something that really should be put down and shouldn’t be going on, [laughs] you know, that’s what heckling is. But I mean he, as I say, he was this chap who clearly could have been a lawyer, and, he rather enjoyed doing that sort of thing, but he enjoyed it by, by trying to make it all make sense, not by, [laughs] by finishing people off.

[35:14] And how was his interest in science-religion relations evident in the sorts of things that he himself read, or listened to perhaps?

He read quite a lot of these sort of books, and I think, I can’t recall, remember the people. Anglicans at that time, in the Twenties and Thirties and Forties, were occupied with what to say about religion and how to say it, and, and you know, they were bringing together these two worlds of discourse. So he really was interested in that.

Yes, one you mention in the book, in the Owl, is, Charles Raven.

Yes. Yes.

[35:58] Mary Midgley Page 14 C1672/05 Track 1

Thank you. And can you tell me about your experience as a child of Christianity, both at home, I’m just assuming that there would have been a certain amount, and actually going to church, sort of churchgoing, presumably to one that your father led.

Well it was all one you see. You just walked through from the rectory to the church. [pause] I was, I accepted it, I was quite happy with it. I liked the, it hymns, and I liked the psalms. And I, on the whole, you know, I could do with the general world view. What I couldn’t do was contact this character, God, and get a reply. Now, I don’t know whether this is my fault or anybody else’s fault, but I, I just had a sort of, sense of an empty room, you see, and I did try from time to time, but it didn’t get me far, and I’m sure I was doing it in the wrong sort of spirit [laughs], but, I combined that with being quite happy with a general acceptance of the Christian view on world affairs, what I was being given as the Christian view on world affairs you see, which was really enlightenment view. [pause] And I would do a better job on this if I had ever really got rid of it you see. I, I have continued to, to not have a sense of God as a person being there, but I do think that, you see, if you ask me, is there something greater than ourselves, and, does it point us the way we need to go, I’d say, yes. [laughs] But I don’t have a name for it, but it, Matthew Arnold says, a sense of something greater than us helps and makes for righteousness, you know, and Matthew Arnold was very unhappy about it, and I’m not very unhappy about it, because I don’t know what I would expect, so to speak. [pause] [38:29] And I think this must be regarded as a gap in my intellectual world, you know. [laughs] I don’t think that I have seen the truth and nobody else has. I don’t think that at all. I think that people perceive things differently, and perceive them from different positions, so, that seems to be how it is. I mean I, I was rather worried about this, and, when I was at college I sort of stopped going to church on the whole, and my father said, ‘Why have you?’ and I made some sort of feeble explanation. But it didn’t, it didn’t develop into any, any sort of theory, and it still hasn’t.

How did you feel, as a child, praying then, and, and feeling, as you say, an empty room when you-?

Mary Midgley Page 15 C1672/05 Track 1

I can do that a bit. I could do that a bit then, and I can do it a bit now. And it’s different from talking to a person, I don’t know what one should say is special about it. I mean, you know, it’s notorious that a great many people, if they find themselves suddenly in danger, pray. Now we all do that I think. [pause] And if you ask, well does that imply that you have some positive belief, well no, it doesn’t. I think this is where the Dawkinses are quite mistaken, they’re looking for some, something that isn’t there. [laughs] [pause] We, we have to some extent as said, haven’t we, a sense of being part of a world which has a consciousness apart from us, that there is some... that our consciousness is part of something larger, and we can to some extent communicate with that, but it’s very unlike the way you would communicate with, with the town hall, you know.

Are you saying, then, that you have continued to pray in some way throughout adult life?

I think I have, but I wouldn’t have, I haven’t been giving it a name.

And would you, without giving it a name, would you have done it at particular times?

No. I don’t think so. It’s, it’s, when you feel the need you, you kind of move in that direction, but it is, it is very inarticulate.

[41:39] And as a, as a child attending, attending church, but presumably having doubts at least about the idea of a personal God and the things that you were being told, did you talk about those doubts and concerns with anyone, with your brother, with your mother? I’m guessing not your father, from what you said, but, perhaps I’m wrong.

I don’t think anyone in the family. I suppose I sometimes did with other people. I say, I’m getting a bit tired. Now, you say, things can stop at some point. What is it, it’s ten past one. [laughs] Is it your idea that at some point you will go and get some lunch somewhere, or is it your idea that you can have some lunch here, which.....

[break for lunch] Mary Midgley Page 16 C1672/05 Track 1

[End of Track 1] Mary Midgley Page 17 C1672/05 Track 2

[Track 2]

Would you now please tell me about memories of the teaching of science at, first Ealing, which is St Leonard’s, and then, the next school?

There wasn’t any at St Leonard’s. We were a very old-fashioned school, and very good, I think, old-fashioned school, taught us maths very well and so on. But, there was no science. At Downe of course, at Downe House, which is a public school for girls, there was meant to be, but the trouble was, the headmistress was very interested in history and literature and everything of that sort, she wasn’t interested in science, so the people she got weren’t any good really. The botany, botany was quite well taught, but the physics, it was awful. I think, I think quite often happens that they were only interested in whether your diagrams were neat, you know, and where the ink was and that sort of thing. So unfortunately I didn’t really pay much attention. I thought when we started on physics, this is going to be good, you see, it was terrible general, but no. So, so I really didn’t take it in or expect it to be interesting. And I started to do so when I went to Oxford, and, at Somerville I found some friends who were zoologists chiefly, and particularly Charlotte Williams-Ellis, the daughter of Clough Williams-Ellis, and she became a great friend of mine right away, and, she was a zoologist. And I began to see a whole sort of world, do you see, that hadn’t impinged on me at all before. [pause] And I think it was, it’s hard to get the dates, but I’m not sure at what point I started to read animal behaviour by Tinbergen and, what's the other fellow? Lorenz and Tinbergen. Yes. Lorenz's is, what is it called? King Solomon’s Ring, that’s right, and, this was absolutely fascinating, you know, I went on from there. That’s the way I got into it. Yah.

[02:44] Did you at any point outside of school have an interest in science, or read on science, other than later on, as you say, these sort of pioneers in-?

Well it started, it started from this stuff of Lorenz’s, and I gathered of course that there were other people writing about, gulls and so forth, and so I read everything I could get from then on. No, it was Lorenz who, who opened it to me, as I think he did to a lot of people. The, King Solomon’s Ring, it’s about creatures that he actually Mary Midgley Page 18 C1672/05 Track 2 kept, and, or knew well, and it, it opened out a world of facts about them which had never come my way. And although we lived in a moderately country place, we weren’t noticing the, the water rats or birds or anything, my family weren’t interested in them. So it was by way of being a conversion. Yah.

[03:43] Thank you. And could you please tell the story of the visit to the Natural History Museum, which was from your first school?

Mm. Yes, they were very good. Although, as I say, they were very old-fashioned, and in fact fundamentalist Christians, they took us to some very good things. They took us again and again to the Old Vic, to pictures, and, and so on. And, one day they took us to the Natural History Museum, and I was a bit puzzled by why I didn’t see that dinosaur in the downstairs hall; the dinosaur wasn’t there in that time apparently. But we went upstairs, and there was the, the sloth, the skeleton, sloth, quite intriguing. And it really came through to me that this was real you see. And the headmistress, although she was this fundamentalist Christian, wasn’t saying, it’s all nonsense, [laughs] she just said, just took us round. Yes, and it’s a thing I think that happened to a lot of people, that, you see a skeleton and you realise, actually, that’s one you see, it’s not just a picture. Yah.

That you were actually looking at old bones.

Yes.

Yes.

Mm.

[05:03] Thank you. And in the biology teaching, which you say was the only good science teaching at the Downe House school, was there any teaching on evolution there?

Mary Midgley Page 19 C1672/05 Track 2

No, it was, it was botany you see, botany was what they were supposed to be teaching us. I don’t think the question of evolution came up. Didn’t have to really.

[05:30] Thank you. Could you take us, then, to, from the point at which you think you first encountered philosophy?

Oh. Well, I think I was encountering it all the time, because my father talked it, and my headmistress talked it, and the teachers, the history teachers talked it. But, when I sort of noticed that it was going on, I was wandering through the school library on a Saturday afternoon thinking life was rather boring, and I took a volume, I took Plato’s Republic off the shelves, and I was hooked at once, you know [laughs], I mean, this is real stuff. And I kind of went on from there.

Do you remember why it was that you took that particular book off the shelf? Or were you just browsing?

Well, obviously I had been hearing about Plato. And I probably had heard that he asked this vast question about whether life is worthwhile, actually worthwhile. So I thought I’d try, as one does, and, [laughs] sometimes that doesn’t work, sometimes it does.

And at the, at Downe House School, a girls’ school, how did you see yourself as being like or different from other girls around you?

Well I didn’t feel different. I suppose, at Downe we were a bit varied, because there were quite a lot of foreign girls, and, among others were the two daughters of that anthropologist, what’s his name, a well-known anthropologist.

Malinowski is it?

Mm?

Malinowski? Mary Midgley Page 20 C1672/05 Track 2

No, before that I think.

Oh.

It may come back. [pause] No, no what are you saying? Not Malinowski. What’s the name? It may come back. Anyway, my headmistress went in for helping intelligent refugees you see, [laughs] brought in - got in a lot. So, I mean there were foreigners, and there were, I suppose, a variety of other people. There was also a solid background of county people who obviously hunted, and I remember somebody cutting on their desk, let’s count all the time lost, time that’s not spent in hunting, [laughs] sort of thing. And, they tended, a lot of them tended to have beside their beds photos of their elder sisters being presented at court, you see, with the feathers and all the rest of it. And then, some people were like that, and others were not, and it wasn’t a tribal warfare, but you did meet various people. [pause] It’s not Malinowski, but it’s something with an L. Oh never mind. So certainly I wasn’t feeling exceptional, except in the sort of way that everybody feels a bit exceptional if they don’t get on very well and they think the other people don’t appreciate them, you know, and life’s difficult. And all that was a bit troublesome, until the last two years after School Certificate we all became I think a little less quarrelsome and we all found it easier to get on together. I, I really enjoyed school at that point, and I made friends who I kept all my life. So, it was, it was not a matter of being plunged into an alien environment.

[09:38] You say a lot in your autobiography about feelings of being incompetent, of being untidy…

Yah.

…of people… And also, of not thinking that you could achieve a kind of, a graceful femininity that certain members of your family thought that you ought to be aspiring to.

Mary Midgley Page 21 C1672/05 Track 2

Everybody said I was untidy, and I lost things, and this was not true, but it, you know, [laughs] one gets through it. And, naturally one sees other people who everybody says are splendid, and, and very elegant, and, are carrying on as they should. So, one has quite a strong feeling of inferiority. I imagine, and this is so common, that it’s not really frightfully significant, but it was significant to me, that I did, I did feel that I was no good. But as I gradually made friends, real friends, as time went on, I recovered from that to some extent.

[10:50] What did your mother suggest… At one point in the book you say that, your mother sometimes made suggestions about what you should wear, and you said, ‘Oh, no, no thank you,’ or…

Yes.

What sort of things… You don’t reveal what sort of things she was suggesting.

Oh dear. Well you see, I remember a Marcel wave being proposed, and I didn’t like it, and the reason I didn’t like it is the same reason I still don’t like it, you know, [laughs] it’s far too stiff. I don’t believe in it so to speak. But it was what there was at the time you see. That tended to happen. And I probably didn’t… This… And this was troublesome, but it, it wasn’t, as I say, it wasn’t a Jane Eyre situation, it wasn’t something haunting me, but it was troublesome. And as time went on, one discovers ways of dressing which, to satisfy both parties so to speak, and when you start… And particularly you see because, at school we wore school uniform, so we weren’t developing as we should have our taste in other clothes. [pause] [12:11] Yes, and, and when I got to Somerville, I’ve probably said this, at Somerville we ranged from being quite wild, some of us, and often from strange places, to extremely boring and, and old-fashioned. On the dining-room tables, the most boring and well- behaved people sat up at the end where the dons were. Did this happen with men’s colleges?

I wouldn’t know I’m afraid. Mary Midgley Page 22 C1672/05 Track 2

You wouldn’t know.

By the time I went to university, and it was Nottingham, it was a mixed hall, and it was all very sort of, buffet-like and mixed in.

It was all, mixed hall. Everything… Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes, so it went from the most boring and well-behaved to, as I say, quite wild people at the far end. [laughs] And I was on the middle table, and so was Iris Murdoch and, and Charlotte Williams-Ellis and my other friends. So, again, I, [laughs] taking refuge in being in a fairly average kind of situation, not anything dramatic. But of course, one always thinks that one’s no good by comparison with both extremes.

[13:38] Could you then tell me now about your decisions about what you wanted to read at, at university?

Mm.

And then, having done so, your experience of university, in the first years.

Mm. Well I had assumed that I would read English, which I was always supposed to be good at, but my English teacher herself said to me, ‘Don’t you do that. You will read English anyway. You’re interested in classics; do that properly.’ And I did, and that worked out all right. And then, someone said, ‘If you do Classics at Oxford, you can do philosophy as well.’ I didn’t really know what it was. But I thought, worth a go. So I did that. [14:30] And, the trouble about this, and I’m sorry, I’ve said it, is, though I and a few other people had been taught Greek, because the [inaud] interested in doing that, we didn’t Mary Midgley Page 23 C1672/05 Track 2 have anything like the preparation in Greek and Latin that the chaps did. Iris and I both had to take coaching before we went up, and I was in a worse mess than Iris, and then, we were still, we were still mystifying our tutors by the things we didn’t know, you know. But we got to know quite a lot of them. And I, I do very much like Greek and Latin literature and the sort of thoughts that arise out of it. [pause] [15:33] And, you see, by the time I got to the philosophy, we’re talking 1941 aren’t we, they started off with Mods, which is all Classics, and then, start on some philosophy and ancient history, and… Oxford was by then a bit deprived. A lot of the people, the dons, weren’t there. But we did have, as our tutor, Donald MacKinnon. Do you know about him?

No, and many, and people listening may not either, so if you could…

No no, they won’t. No. No, I mean he’s not famous, because he didn’t… His writings weren’t actually terribly interesting. But he was a smashing tutor, and a very good philosopher, and he spent an awful lot of time thinking and worrying. He, the other reason he’s notorious was, he was extremely eccentric. He, he would stand suddenly in the road and just think for a minute, you know, or, or something. He would do totally unexpected things. But he was, as I say, a jolly good philosopher. Yes, his tutor… his pupils also included Philippa Foot. And Iris took him extremely seriously. I’m just saying Iris as if you’re supposed to know about her.

Yes, this is Irish Murdoch.

Yes.

Yes.

And, you see, what was happening I suppose in philosophy at this point, Language, Truth and Logic. You know Language, Truth and Logic?

By Ayer?

Mary Midgley Page 24 C1672/05 Track 2

Yes.

If that's how you say his surname.

Yes yes. Very slick, and more or less tells you, you needn’t worry because none of it means anything, you know. That was the fashion. And, Donald MacKinnon did not go for it, and he thought, there’s a lot of sense in everything. He made a lot of Kant, and also idealists like Bradley who other people were not reading, and, and Wittgenstein, and, he was into Wittgenstein already you see, which other people were not, Wisdom and so on. So we got ahead with our philosophy, and enjoyed ourselves. But the, I mean, the trouble with Classics was really still with me all through my Oxford career, because, as I say, we just hadn’t read a quarter of what the, all the chaps had, and they’d been in their public schools, learning it all up. But we liked it, you know. [laughs] Am I answering?

Yes yes, absolutely. Yes.

Yes.

[18:37] Could you tell me about the experience of, the specific experience of being female at Oxford at this time, as an undergraduate?

Mm Mm.

I’m asking for two reasons. One is because, well one is the obvious reason, that, even though it was wartime, you were in a sort of numerical minority still, is that correct? Am I right in saying so? You, female students were a minority at this time. The second reason is that, some of the time in the, in your autobiography when you were talking about philosophy, you are talking about certain kinds of maleness in that philosophy I, I sense.

Mm. Mm. Mm.

Mary Midgley Page 25 C1672/05 Track 2

So, yes, so, but the, the short direct question is, tell me about the experience of being a female undergraduate at this time.

Mm. Mm. Well, one has to say in the first place that the experience of being a female undergraduate was still very unlike what it is today. I remember I got myself onto the, what do you call it committee? Committee of, some students…

Student Union?

No. There’s a name, isn’t there, for…

Oh, Junior Common Room?

That’s right. Yes, and the first meeting that I can remember, the question was coming up whether perhaps we might be allowed to have men to tea, not only on Saturdays but on Saturdays and Sundays. And I remember the president of the JCR, who was otherwise obviously a very sensible woman, saying, this might look very attractive, but, we should remember that we aren’t quite sure what will follow from it, you see, and, [laughs] discouraging us as much as she could, which didn’t work. But, I mean, that was still going on. And, they’d got rid of the chaperones not much before, and, the whole idea was a bit absurd. I think that the boys who had been at public school had been having a pretty monastic life as well as the girls. People were very shy a lot of the time, it took them a long time to get to know each other. And, yes, we… [pause] I remember saying that… Oh yes, that’s right. About, some time, late 1920s, there was some committee of all the heads of houses which used to meet and which used to be very influential, but the heads of the women’s colleges were not on it. They asked, could they be put on it, and this was considered, and the reply came back, ‘No, I’m afraid you can’t because, they meet over dinner.’ Think that out. [laughs] You see… [laughs] It seemed obvious to them that this couldn’t be done. So I mean, that’s the background, and we still had to take notice of it. And I remember the dean when I went up to Somerville, who was again a very sensible woman, saying, ‘Look, you might think it would be fun to break all the rules, but really, we’ve had so much difficulty getting as far as we are, we can’t have any more of this.’ [22:18] Mary Midgley Page 26 C1672/05 Track 2

So, that being the background, now we come to the philosophy thing. Now several people, philosophers, have shown interest in me and my friends as a group, and the interest that they show is this, that they say, well there are all of you turning out quite good philosophers, hasn’t gone on has it? Why not? [laughs] So we tried to explain. And, I mean, the answer is, as I say, by the time I was doing philosophy, so that it wasn’t… it was, that was from second year on, that was when the, the men had all gone to the war except a few, and there were as many women as men at the classes that I went to. And a lot of them were rather harmless because they were conscientious objectors or cripples or ordinands you see. [laughs] So, so there simply wasn’t the same ferocious… I mean, what I’m talking about, they talk about this, men, certain style of talking people down, which is terribly easily done if you’ve got a loud voice and the right sort of background. And it just struck me today, because I was reading about the change in primate ethology from Jane Goodall on, that, you know, that Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey and a couple of other people transformed primate ethology, it was really rather similar. You know, you let in a different lot of people, and things proceed differently. And, I can remember reading Jane Goodall early on and being very impressed at the way her predecessor, you know, who was looking at chimps, had been, used to lock himself up in a cage to be safe, and she went and sat down on the ground among the chimps. And all those four people who did the - Birute Galdikas, Lorenz[?] isn’t it, and somebody else with the lemurs, they did that. And it seems to me to have been rather similar in its effects, that, you know, you simply saw the world differently. [pause] Yes, people are, as I say, beginning to take an interest in me and my chums, and sort of think of us as a, as a school so to speak. But it’s, it’s not really about, about teaching; it’s, it’s about life isn’t it, [laughs] in which people, people are looking at each other, and are being understood. [25:33] Yes, I mean, at the time, I was aware that this was happening. But you see, the thing about the war was, it changed so many things. You weren’t at all surprised if things seemed to be changing. I had got very used to giving that as an explanation for why things were as they were. And there wasn’t any sort of, explicit declaration going on about this, nobody was saying, oh, I’ve got a different class this year from what I had last. The dons were indeed very aware that their lives were changing, you see everybody’s life was changing. And this is, I must say, is the advantage of a European war, [laughs] it has upset things. It explains all sorts of changes, and of Mary Midgley Page 27 C1672/05 Track 2 course, it explains some which it shouldn’t, and… And so that goes on. I’m trying to think whether Philippa Foot was mentioning this. I think we all did. What we all mentioned was, we understood very well, the change that was happening in the dons, the more realistic way in which, for example, philosophy was being, beginning to be thought about, and we were well aware that though we didn’t like Ayer, we still more didn’t like the previous tradition which really was ready to die. And we were sort of, fighting it all in a rather undistinguished sort of way, we didn’t think this is something new that’s happening. And I’m rather distressed that things haven’t gone on in the sort of direction that we pointed them in. And I’m afraid, I mean this is part of what’s happening to academic life altogether, isn’t it, everything’s getting more specialised, everybody has to ask smaller and smaller questions, because if they ask big ones, someone might notice that they haven't finished, you know, and things of that sort. [laughs] You are nodding at me, and I, I probably… I mean I, people have asked me, am I distressed about the state of universities now? Well the answer is, yes. I think something very bad is happening, and it’s getting much harder for people to think about what they really want to think about.

Yes. And that’s actually clear in your autobiography in terms of the, the need to publish quickly…

Yes.

…and therefore to stay within the existing sort of, modes of understanding and just work on a little detail.

That’s right.

Because then you can fire things out quickly.

Yah. Yah.

[28:33] In terms of you and your friends as a group, in your autobiography you come to a period after the war where you’re back in Oxford and you’re living in a bedsit near Mary Midgley Page 28 C1672/05 Track 2 your friends, near Iris and, and Philippa, and Elizabeth Anscombe, and you say then that you met and talked a lot about Oxford philosophy and what to do about it.

Mm. Yah.

And you think that it was there that you hammered out your own thoughts which you all then went on to publish. For the outsider listening, can you spell out what was the problem with Oxford philosophy, and what you as a group thought should be done about it?

It was entirely, talking about Oxford moral philosophy, entirely formal. It was all about moral judgements, what forms they had to take to be valid, you know, how argument could correctly proceed. It wasn’t about, how to live. I remember Hare, R M Hare was the sort of centre of this, because, Language, Truth and Logic was indeed very formal, it was all about how nothing makes sense except factual statements, so the whole of philosophy is out. And, so, moral language is all emotive, it’s just expressing, either expressing approval and disproval, or calling for it, you know, you know this stuff?

Yes, but, the people listening may not. And I’m, I’m nodding to encourage you. Yes.

Well, so, the next step after that, making it a little bit less implausible, was that, moral language isn’t just emotional, it’s giving orders really. [laughs] Imperative, what did they call it? I can’t remember. You say that something, something’s good or right, you weren’t just saying, hurrah for it; you are saying, go and do it, you know. And Hare worked that out in more detail, so that he became the sort of bible of, of philosophy at the time. And, bookshops would have this purple stripe of Hare’s books, you know. [laughs] I remember, something about, yes, general, whether general moral judgements, what sort of sense they might make. And the sort of example that he gave us, yes, somebody, if somebody defended the… Is it a trombone? Yes that’s right. I think it was the trombone. You would have this trombone enthusiast who said the trombone, that wonderful instrument, should be played all the time. You see, this was the sort of generalisation that Hare was suggesting. And, Hare did raise the question, what are we to do if we don’t agree Mary Midgley Page 29 C1672/05 Track 2 with this? And, the general idea was that you just have to come round, or not come round, you know. The general principles were not being thought about and brought together, and, and used systematically; they were just taken to be what everybody had. And by good luck on the whole, you see, they’re mostly utilitarian. So, you… [laughs] So, I am not trying to be fair to Hare at this moment, but you ask me what bothered us you see; [laughs] I think it’s fairly clear what bothered us. And, harmless students, who really wanted to think about moral questions, were presented with this terribly crude set of instruments. It did, I think, the best job as far as argument within the, within the academic world went, because she did it in very simple terms, and she said that you, if you ask why some general moral principle could be obtained, you are not asking for some yet higher one which you couldn’t find; you are asking for the context, you are asking how this fits in to the rest of life, what detailed meaning it has. And he did that very clearly and put it all in the, in the journals. So it went down, and so it should. [33:52] Iris got increasingly distressed about this state of philosophy altogether, so she walked out of it after a time and simply went and wrote novels. Now I attribute this to, particularly to Austin. Do you know John, J L Austin? Oh, well, he was the kind of pope of this, the better, the better style of this sort of thing. And, he had a class every Saturday morning to which you had to be invited, you had to be, thought to be, you had to be a good philosopher. But it went into the, it investigated the, the verbal details of how these words were being used. He was terribly good at seeing that somebody else wasn’t being perfectly clear you see. And he, he terrified people. The other person… Iris was one person he terrified, and the other was Isaiah Berlin, you see, and Berlin had on his desk, it seems, a notice pinched from a garage which said ‘Austin’, which was to remind him to be terribly careful to be precise, you see. And, I mean he saw a lot of Austin. After a time Berlin started saying, ‘I don’t actually do philosophy any longer, I just do history of thought.’ [laughs] And he got put off by this, and I think, I’m so sure that’s what happened to Iris, that, I mean, she, she said, ‘I can’t do philosophy, it’s too demanding,’ you see. Meaning this incredibly detailed verbal analysis, which is what they liked doing. You are nodding again, and I hope you are…

Yes. Mary Midgley Page 30 C1672/05 Track 2

Yes. I mean, that was what was happening when I was a graduate student. And Iris got out in her own way, and I got out in my own way by just getting a job elsewhere. And I am glad I did. I couldn’t have lived with it, you know. Because it’s not that they couldn’t do it, they could, you know, Austin and his folks were extremely skilled at making verbal points, but you can go on doing that forever, and it gets smaller and smaller. This is where the smaller and smaller-ness was coming in, you know. [pause] Where did we start? Am I still on the same track?

[36:32] You are. And can I ask some follow-up questions on it?

Yah.

One is, how, how did that particular style of philosophy that was taking place in Oxford, how did that relate to science, philosophy’s view of science, philosophy’s regard for science, its belief in the status of science and so on?

Well now, philosophy of science by then was already becoming a speciality of its own, wasn’t it. [pause] And a lot of it was about rather verbal points. What is a hypothesis, you know. [pause] Sorry, I’m on a different track, I can’t…

What I mean is, what was the motive, what was the motivation for these philosophers to concentrate on this sort of philosophy, this narrow verbal language, formal philosophy, what was the motivation for that among the people practising?

Oh. Now that is interesting. I think that they were seeing it being done by very capable people, done very capably, very well done so to speak, and it’s like a puzzle, you know, you, you see other people doing it, and they seem to be getting it right, but, but there you are. I mean they are always liable to criticise you, you see, your own, you own attempts don’t seem to be so good. It’s a fascination I think of any art which people are seeing practised and which they begin to admire, they admire it more and more, and they forget about everything else. This isn’t uncommon, is it, you know? [laughs] Mary Midgley Page 31 C1672/05 Track 2

Mm.

Yes. And I mean, if I look to the way it affected science. I mean the, the philosophical questions pop up in science a great deal in the time, and one way in which they pop up is what makes sense, isn’t it, that, you know, that, Big Bang, does it make sense to ask what happened before… [laughs] This sort of thing. Well, if you turn the kind of philosopher we’ve been mentioning on to that, they can go on forever. But, it isn’t very likely to, to give us an idea about the Big Bang. I think, philosophers are beginning to sort themselves out to those who like, simply liked playing verbal games, and those who had something else they wanted to do more. And, you see this thing about moral judgements, if people were just looking for some consistent way of talking, and they started asking, why does, why do moral judgements affect the world, what is their relation to the world? it’s very easy to become puzzled, because, what happens in the world is, is acts, particular acts, and… [pause] Sorry, I’m getting lost. [pause] It can begin to seem quite irrelevant to somebody’s moral judgements, what they do, because the relevance of it is always you know to be spelt out, gets pretty detailed, and there are alternative ways of spelling it out. And I think… You see I’m just looking at an article that’s in Philosophy for January, somebody saying, ‘Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?’ Progress, [laughs] you know. And, he wants… Why isn’t philosophy… And he says this means, ‘Why isn’t philosophy more like physics?’ so to speak. Now it does seem to me an extraordinarily stupid philosopher who is asking himself that question, but still, he is asking himself, on print, in paper, that question, because people have got into the habit of thinking physics is top, somehow, why aren’t we more like physics? I mean I find this doubly surprising because, physicists are all busy disagreeing anyway, you know [laughs], saying that, saying that, progress is, is towards agreement with everybody, and philosophers don’t achieve it, which of course is true, they’re always arguing. But he thinks physicists do. But, [laughs] yes, he… What they can achieve agreement on is entirely verbal, and if they can only do that by really bringing their conventions together. And, I mean, when Hare gives this example of the trombone… It wasn’t a trombone, I think it was the French horn, or something. But anyway, as an example of what somebody might mean by a moral principle you see, then we are right off the point, aren’t we, because it isn’t an Mary Midgley Page 32 C1672/05 Track 2 example of that. But they get, they get to using examples which in form appear to be what they are after; they aren’t really. I think I’m getting a bit stupid again. I don’t want to send you off for another meal, but we might take a pause.

[End of Track 2] Mary Midgley Page 33 C1672/05 Track 3

[Track 3]

.....graduate students that I was with after the war, wasn’t by any means a typical one. Most of these people had been doing all sorts of completely different things. Very few of them had come straight up the scholastic ladder. And I think, that generation, Geoffrey Warnock, Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, and, and the others, really were very interesting philosophers I think, and it’s really hard to expect students, schoolchildren, you know, to come straight in to doing these things. They do very often do something else now, and I think it’s a good idea. But… [pause]

[01:02] One of the things that I, I’m trying to think about how to ask really, is, the extent to which you and your, your friends, Iris and others, were reacting against a certain kind of masculinity in academic life.

Mm. Mm.

So, I want to ask but don’t know quite how to about the, the femaleness of the philosophy that you wanted to do.

Mm. Well yes. You see, it hasn’t been going on long enough to be easy to pick on. I mean, when you say, why is X different from Y, you do want several Xes as it were. I mean, one point that certainly came up about this business of moral philosophy is a willingness to talk about feelings, and I think that was probably pretty central, because the, the kind of stuff that Hare was selling was really behaviourist; it really did centre on generalisations about behaviour, you know, and that plainly isn’t what, [laughs] what [inaud] about. [pause] But it isn’t, it isn’t just, as it were, expressing, expressing emotions, it’s being willing to take account of them, isn’t it, and see life as a whole, rather than as a series of little particular acts. Holism was a rather rude word for quite a time, you know, people tended to think that you should always be talking about particular examples. Yes, I am getting rather stupid. I’ll just, what was I trying to do.

[03:05] Mary Midgley Page 34 C1672/05 Track 3

But when you were talking with your friends, for example, at the time when you were living in the bedsit and you were getting together and talking about philosophy, would you talk about the maleness of philosophy, about the behaviour of male philosophers at…?

I think we took it for granted that this, or, that the philosophers we were objecting to were going on in a typically male sort of way. I do remember somebody saying how hard it was actually to make any progress in discussion if you had got a lot of students from America shouting, you see. [laughs] And the mere loudness of the voices does make quite a difference. I mean, I’m saying, the occasional male who we did have at Oxford at that time didn’t tend to be so assertive, so, [laughs] it made a difference. But, I think we took it for granted that the current philosophic tradition was entirely a male tradition. And I mean they, it is pretty well known, and Plato said it, that you shouldn’t just be trying to win arguments, and Plato, as soon as he had finished saying that, started trying to win arguments, and you know, [laughs] it goes on all the time. And, up to a point it’s, it’s all right, but it, it takes over, and it takes over, if you put together a lot of extra intelligent and highly qualified and interested chaps, then you get more of it, not less.

When you say that the men were behaving in a typical male sort of way, what does that mean?

Well it means shouting in the first place. I mean that may sound crude, but, simply not listening, not wanting to hear what the other side said. Let me think if I can produce an actual example. [pause] Yes, I think, I think I would have to go back to that argument of Plato’s, and I can’t now remember where it is, but it’s a very famous argument of his where he, he talks about being philonike, wanting victory, and often philologos, wanting the argument. And, he says how these things feed on each other, if you, if you don’t do the one, you’re going to do the other [laughs], you know, and it’s… But, whether or not you have the victory in this particular argument doesn’t matter at all; whether or not you are right does matter. As I say, he’s on both sides about this, because one catches, one catches Socrates out in lots of those arguments, just taking advantage of some verbal point. But when he’s thinking about it, he knows he shouldn’t. And I mean, it’s the discipline, the drill that’s required I think Mary Midgley Page 35 C1672/05 Track 3 that isn’t present. [pause] Now, of course women can shout each other down, it’s not peculiar to men, but it’s, it, it’s not a sort of, central and accepted part of what you are doing in quite the same sort of way. Oh yes, now, what is the fellow’s name? I quoted him in, in the Owl. A well-known philosopher, American philosopher. He says how he started doing philosophy under the regime of some very famous and successful philosopher, and how this fellow would put everybody down, and what our hero coming in thought was, how am I going to be able to do that? You see, he didn’t think this is wrong; [laughs] he thought, this is how, what we’re all aiming at, so to speak. Oh sorry, I’m awful on names now. I should be able to tell you who it’s… I read his, I read his memoirs, and I thought, this is really striking. But as I say, he wasn’t criticising it, he was just saying, that’s, that’s how it came. Yah. But he does describe what went on in a way that takes us back years, it’s monstrous, you know, it, the aim is not the aim, that it should be something quite different. I mean, you know, there are those that will tell you that there’s no natural sex difference and it’s all society, but then it started somewhere, and it, [laughs] there are no, nobody’s succeeded in finding people who have had no social conditioning, so, we have to assume that what people do everywhere is what people do, you see. [laughs] [08:40] Yes, I’m reading Middlemarch. Have you read Middlemarch?

No.

Jolly good. And there’s a doctor there who’s a very intelligent chap, and in an absent- minded sort of way he marries a rather stupid woman, he hadn’t noticed that she’s stupid, because he doesn’t really notice what she says very much. And, he finds he has reason to order her about. Yes, she, she gets pregnant, and he’s a doctor, and he says, ‘You shouldn’t go riding.’ So she goes riding. So she has a miscarriage. And that sort of thing keeps happening. But at no point does he notice that he ordered her about, you see, that he, he had simply ignored this, [laughs] this disagreement that there was. And that was… I mean you know, he’s quite a nice chap, and it struck me as what has habitually happened a great deal in a great many cultures, and it’s not totally wrong but you do have to be aware of it, and people aren’t. And of course, academic life started off, goodness, in a monastic situation in which this was taken for Mary Midgley Page 36 C1672/05 Track 3 granted wasn’t it. [pause] I keep thinking somebody’s knocking on my door, but it isn’t my door, it’s somebody else’s.

[10:16] Was what you call the, the egos and the, the cockfighting in the Owl, was that less when you were in philosophy departments other than Oxford?

Ah. Well, yes, because, in both the philosophy departments that I… I was in Reading and then Newcastle, quite small, and there isn’t the same opportunity for sort of, empire-building you see, if it’s quite small. And what’s more, if you’ve got a smallish department of six people, you’ve got to treat each other reasonably, or it shows, you know. Yes, now, when… [laughs] When I first came here, and, my husband was in the department, I wasn’t, the head of department was John Findlay. Does that ring any bells?

Only that I recognise it from the Owl, and, you talked about him being a, a campaigning atheist.

He was rather an eminent sort of, Wittgensteinian. And he was the kind of chap who was always laying down the law and saying some rather startling thing which was always meant to go over. He was a fine example of what I’m talking about, because, [laughs] it wasn’t that what he was saying was, wasn’t valuable, it often was valuable, but then, there was no, no possibility of anybody seeing any, anything wrong with it, you know. And that’s a kind of person who does get into philosophy all too easily I think. [pause] Yes, I mean he was, as it were, within the current mythology, but he isn’t, as I say, he was, he was quite, [laughs] quite a good, quite a good Wittgensteinian, and of course Wittgenstein, oh dear me, yes, well, he was a, an ego, wasn’t he, and he was always right. And it was quite interesting seeing how Elizabeth Anscombe, who also was always right, when she was with Wittgenstein, she, [laughs] she was quite, she became quite small and, and submissive. It, yes it’s all a part of dear human interaction, isn’t it, that people should be setting up their own little worlds and having little fights which they more or less resolve in the long run. [pause] She’s not part of your remit, you’re not doing anything about her, or are you doing…?

Mary Midgley Page 37 C1672/05 Track 3

Well possibly, yes.

[13:16] Yes. Yes, no, I, I believe that her family have now loosened up and are willing to talk about her. They were frightfully defensive for a time, I don’t know really quite why. Well it was partly the Wittgensteinian pottiness, you know, Wittgensteinians tended to think the rest of the world was, the rest of the world was very deplorable. I think we’re going to have to stop for today.

[End of Track 3] Mary Midgley Page 38 C1672/05 Track 4

[Track 4]

OK. For this final track today, could we jump to the late Sixties and Seventies. And could you tell me about your, the development of your further interest in ethology, including, if you can, your response to The Selfish Gene.

Yes. When I read, as I carefully did, all the books I could get about every animal in sight, general questions of course came up, but, it seemed to me that what the data shows is that life, the life of all these creatures, is much more subtle and much more like our own than we have been in the habit of thinking, that there isn’t a standard animal quite different from us in the whole series of different kinds of creature which share a great deal with each other and with us. And I got very interested in the myths with which people have responded to all this in the tendency to credit animals with either being embodied vices or having some very simple role to play in, in life. And it seemed to me very important to demystify this a bit to explain to people that they, that the world is a bit more complicated and a bit more continuous than they had been inclined to think. So I tried to do that, and as there are lots and lots of interesting myths on the way, [laughs] I found I had plenty to do. But, now what did I move on to? I moved on to a number of different things, didn’t I. [pause] Yes, I mean this affects the mind/body problem, because people tend to think that the mind is the human bit and the body is really rather a mistake, and you can separate them, even though they also often think that the mind isn’t real, because it isn’t physical so it can’t be, can’t be part of the serious world. Now, is that the track that I followed at this point? Yah, I mean one track concerns Beast and Man itself that -, you’ve probably seen the book, but, when I first wrote it, yes, I wrote it after a week or more at Cornell, in which I was meeting academics of every stripe from anthropologists to mathematicians and everything. And I wanted it chiefly to be an exploration of what it is to be rational, the point being that being rational is something much more than just being consistent, it’s having a life that’s revolved around a well-chosen set of principles, you know, that it's being, I think I said it’s got a lot to do with being sane, than it has with doing puzzles. And, so, I wrote that, and sent it to the Cornell publishers who said, ‘This is very nice but will you go and read Sociobiology.’ [laughs] So I had to do that. And, obviously, from a publicity point of view, they were quite right, this was the topic of the day, and I needed to relate to it. But I Mary Midgley Page 39 C1672/05 Track 4 related to it in two ways, because I thought Sociobiology said some things that were perfectly sensible about humans being animals, and some other things which were less sensible about, that the way to do the human sciences would be just to do physical science. And I just - the other day I came across, I’d forgotten about it, a very excited passage at the end of Sociobiology where he says that, we’re having trouble with the social sciences because we don’t reduce them as we should to the physical sciences, and if we got these brain cells right, then there would be no more problems. He wouldn’t say that today. [laughs] He stopped saying that quite, quite early I think. But it was rather fashionable in the Seventies, this sort of, sort of reductivism, very simple reductivism. So, I found myself opposing that, and I opposed it in various books. But I remained very interested in the myths by which people have, have shaped their intellectual lives. I wrote the, both Evolution as a Religion, and Science As Salvation, which are both about the way in which the language and habit of theology pops up, duplicated as part of physical science. Most of the book will be devoted to cosmology and so forth, and then the last chapter, they let themselves go, and, tell the most extraordinary stories about what’s going to happen in the future and so on. Have you come across this stuff?

I follow what you’re saying, yes.

Yes. So that I have spent quite a lot of my thought and writing life in trying to explain the divergent sort of myths by which people explain the world and which they consider to be science. It started with, somebody asking me to go to a talk at a conference on evolution and religion. So then I thought, evolution as a religion, you see, and it, [laughs] it seemed to me, there’s a lot of meat in all that. So I went, went on doing that. All of which is, of course, not just debunking, it’s explaining the way we, the maps that we have of the intellectual world, which I think are terribly influential, and we often don’t notice how we’ve got a pattern imposed which doesn’t actually fit what’s going on. And this is a bit wasteful, you know, and one would do better if one wasn’t trying to fit in stories of that kind. [08:42] So this is, has served to some extent to, to get round the difficulties that are posed by this stark opposition of, about science and religion, by showing that things which appear to be science, and which appear to be religion, aren’t exactly [laughs], you Mary Midgley Page 40 C1672/05 Track 4 know. I mean, it’s not, it’s debunking of a kind, but it’s not meant to be destructive. It’s meant to be useful. That I suppose is rather the role that I’ve tried to play, when it seemed to me that some conflict was going on unprofitably, and by just stating things a little bit differently, one wouldn’t have to have that conflict. I am still impressed and puzzled by the, the ambitiousness of some of these myths about the future, and was particularly, what’s the fellow’s name? Oh, sorry, it’ll come back in a minute. The myths about how we’re all going to colonise space and, and go on forever. Somebody who is otherwise perfectly sensible indulges in this, and I never know whether they know that they’re doing it, you know. Oh I do want to remember his name, because I met him and he seemed very nice, at one time. [pause] These stories about how we shall, we shall be able to go sailing in space, just as we would go sailing on the Pacific, you know, in our little boats, and we shall land on, what do you call the things, asteroids. I’m getting quite interested, because now people do talk about landing asteroids. It always seems to me it’s impossible, that, you know, there won’t be the gravity, will there? [laughs] I don’t know.

In the Owl you say that these kind of techno-feature stories…

Yah.

…and myths about, you know, economic development, emerged after the end of an enthusiasm for Marxism, which you explain, the idea that people needed some sort of forward trajectory, or upward movement in their, the way they understood the world.

Yes. Yes.

Do you still feel that way about…?

I certainly do. I mean I think the great popularity of Marxism for a time can be accounted for by the wish for this sort of future, and when Marxism, I mean it was discredited by the Soviet Union one way and another, people looked for something else. A lot of them had been Marxist and they moved on, but even if they hadn’t, they had the same, the same fantasy. And I mean, science fiction, I have, in two minds about. I mean I, some, particularly short science fiction stories I think very highly of, Mary Midgley Page 41 C1672/05 Track 4 because what they do is, posit one change and say what the West would, what would happen, you see. Now that’s a very interesting, informative and interesting sort of thing. But, very often they go on, not to ask what would happen if, but to sort of, make a wish fulfilment of this, this whole, whole different situation. [pause] And it does seem to me that this goes very oddly with the science of which it is often supposed to form a part. And the books which I chiefly jumped on in, in the second of those books of mine, Evolution as a Religion, yes, and… I know Evolution as a Religion is the first one; what’s the other one? [pause] Science As Salvation.

Mm.

That’s right. Yes. It was more explicitly, a substitute religion really, and, I really don’t fully understand, I’d like to understand better, in what state of mind they are doing this. I’m nearly remembering the fellow’s name. He’s somebody quite important. Who does… [pause] Carl Sagan I think was rather subject to this sort of shift, and, I don’t think that Jim Lovelock does it, come to think of it, it’s quite interesting that he doesn’t, he is rather friendly with Paul[sic] Sagan. The shift from simply talking about what, the facts of things as they are, to constructing a cosmos of a wildly, wish-fulfilling kind, you know, does seem to be rather odd, and, you see the trouble with, people have the idea that the great thing about scientists is, they only tell you facts. Well it isn’t so. And the more I’m struck by the fact that it isn’t so, the more I wrote about that. [laughs] Because, where it isn’t facts, it’s prophesies, isn’t it, in the sense of not telling you of necessarily in the future, but of, giving you the meaning of those. Yah. So, that’s the way I suppose, the route which my writings have followed as a whole. Apart from, I did more about animals, and how we are animals and animals are us, and we all should consider ourselves as, in the same, same box. And all these things… Yes, I mean that’s something that was happening at the time, isn’t it, I wasn’t alone here, Peter Singer and Stephen Clark and a lot of other people were saying why animals concern us and we should do more about them. I know, things have changed, things have improved greatly in that way. But still, a strange remnant left of the idea that animals probably aren’t really conscious, that you would have to prove, and you haven’t roved yet, that they are, you see. You know, how do you start to prove that you are standing here so to speak? It, it’s a wild idea I Mary Midgley Page 42 C1672/05 Track 4 think. But I mean it, it’s, it just shows how slow things are to change at the basic level of what we take for granted, you know. [16:44] And of course, consciousness, which wasn’t allowed to be talked about at all in the behaviourist epoch, suddenly has become, and has remained, a great sort of, topic, hasn’t it, and people keep saying, they’re explaining it, and, they have got that thing called the hard problem of consciousness which they will shortly answer. I don’t think anyone’s in a situation to do any such thing, [laughs] you know, and, it’s… Because I mean, there’s a confident materialism around, isn’t there. In a way people want to say, all that there is, is chemicals really, and then when their attention is drawn to the fact that they seem to be conscious, they don’t know where to put it at all. And I mean, we’ve sort of lost the idea of spirit, and I think we probably need some such idea, because, not everything is, not everything is chemicals, and not all the questions are about chemicals. So, how are we doing at this point?

[17:52] That’s great. Could you now tell me about your reading of The Selfish Gene?

Ah. Yes, well this is a silly story. What actually happened was, that I didn’t read The Selfish Gene for some time. I read, as I say, Sociobiology very carefully, and worked on it for some years, and, I assumed, because I heard about The Selfish Gene, that it was roughly the same stuff. But then some years later I did read it, and I was appalled at the, at the rhetoric, at the, at the drama, at the attempt to sort of, build psychological egoism on this myth. So, I wrote a rather cross article in Philosophy saying that. And, this caught a certain amount of attention, not a great deal but some, and… Now, what happened? [laughs] A silly thing that happened was, Dawkins was talking to a Swedish biologist called, now I’ll get her name again in a minute, and she told him the story which I’ve just told you, about how I had at one time not, not read The Selfish Gene, but because I read it suddenly after a long time you see, it shocked me. Dawkins got tis wrong, and thought that she had told him that I had never read it at all, and started putting about that story. And after a bit, various people mentioned this to me, I wrote to him and said, ‘Look, there seems to be a mistake.’ And he replied and said, ‘Oh I’m sorry if it’s a mistake,’ but didn’t stop saying it. And has gone on over the years, from time to time [laughs], saying that I never read it. I mean, the Mary Midgley Page 43 C1672/05 Track 4 thing which makes it ridiculous is that the article in question contains a lot of quotes, long quotes, from The Selfish Gene, which I could not have, if I hadn’t read the book. So, there’s been a bit of a row. And I mean I deplore writing rather a bad-tempered article, I think I should have thought harder, but I was so startled, you know. I, I knew that E O Wilson was being a bit crude about the egoism in Sociobiology, but I, I, you know, I was used to that, it didn’t shock me; but the, the rhetoric of The Selfish Gene did, because it, it’s not just the occasional metaphor, you know, it’s really a ludicrous language in that it’s talking about the Chicago gangsters and so forth. And politically you see, it, I think the reason why it looked convincing at the time is exactly the reason why it was so scandalous. But this came out in the, in the Thatcher and Reagan epoch, when people were beginning to say greed is good. And so, it wouldn’t just be considered as one aspect of the story; it was fairly central to the story, but there is no, no motivation except self, [laughs] self-promotion. So that’s been the story. And I don’t think that it’s at all important really except in so far as Dawkins is so jolly influential, and this was what made me feel I must do something about it you see, that it was being, The Selfish Gene had, had really filled a gap, there were no such, really, convenient and short and easy books about evolution, people didn’t know about it, and a lot of what he said about it was OK, but tying it on to this psychological story, seemed to me politically disastrous, and that’s why I got cross.

[22:39] And, you say that he’s been so influential. Have you taken an interest in his work since and in the New Atheism and…?

No, I mean, I’ve naturally noticed him cropping up from time to time, and since he’s started being anti-God, I find people aren’t so keen on him. Because it’s so obviously crude, you know, he hasn’t bothered to know what religion’s like or, [laughs] what it means. He’s got cruder and so have the other, who is it, Sam Harris? There are various sort of, anti-Godders. But I mean I can understand it in the States, because they have so much religion going on anyway. I don’t see the motivation for doing it here, I really don’t. And, the Church is not the most influential, you know, [laughs] sinister body, that, you were worrying about banks, that would make much more sense to me. But it, it’s, I suppose most of my lifetime Christianity has seemed to get less influential here; I think it’s sort of picking itself up a bit better now, lately, Mary Midgley Page 44 C1672/05 Track 4 because the kind of people who are talking about it, you know, are more sensible. But, you do have to take account of that in what you choose to write about, don’t you. And, starting to shout about religion being dangerous, and, when was it, ten years ago when he did, does seem to me to be a waste of time, but, I don’t know.

[24:24] Could you tell me more about your work with the Science and Religion Forum? In other words, the origin of your relations with it, and then why.

Oh, I don’t know. I suppose, I must have been in correspondence with it and going to its conferences a long time ago. I was at one time chair of the meetings. And, I mean plainly it’s a body that deals with a lot of subjects that I think are important, and I’m glad to hear about them.

You were, you served as its secretary for a while, did you?

I served as chair I think.

Chair, OK.

Yes.

And do you remember who invited you to take part, and…?

No, I don’t, not now. Sorry. But it wasn’t anybody particularly eccentric, you know, I, a lot of people I knew there and they, it seemed to me to be perfectly sensible. And, the trouble, it’s very difficult for any sort of interdisciplinary body like that to get people who are sort of aware of both sides, and some of them always are a bit too far off, and some of them are boring, but, the subjects always seem to me to be important.

[25:44] And, I’m sorry that this isn’t a targeting question, but, I assume that you follow continuing argument about relations between science and religion in newspapers, say, or on the radio or on TV. Mary Midgley Page 45 C1672/05 Track 4

Mm.

Do you have any insight into why the, this, the conflict thesis if you like is quite robust, that it continues, it, in spite of attacks on it from all sorts of positions, it is a sort of, recurrent story?

Oh well, I’m saying, I think that this was largely invented more or less in the 1880s and largely in America. But, there is plenty of course to go on, because people from Voltaire onwards have been shouting, haven’t they, and, it’s got some kind of political often… I mean, particularly in the States where everybody is in it to some extent, where, you know, you say to somebody, ‘Which church do you go to?’ You don’t say that to anybody over here. [laughs] And I’m sure that, because of the sort of people who went to America, the reasons so many of them went, because they were persecuted Protestants of one sort or another, or they, they wanted some usually a different sort of religion from the people around them. Because of that, it, it’s carried a great deal more force than it has over here, it’s been a matter of general debate. And I’m sure there has been a lot of sinister religion going on, and, you know, people have completely mistaken notions, or notions that they… or, notions about, about religion, or simply being dishonest, and using it… So, I mean, it seemed to me that in American culture, there was always a reason to start shouting against religion so to speak, quite a lot of different reasons. Some of that will have been true over here, because the Church was very influential and had, did have a lot of money. And, one thing I know, T H Huxley was desperately trying to get some money spent on science education, and when he looked at the amount that was spent on theological education, he began to get very upset, you see, and that, that’s a perfectly, that’s a sort of science versus religion bit which has been quite important over here. So there’s, there’s been some grounds for it, but people do like a row you know, I don’t know, don’t know if much more of an explanation is needed. Yes, and, I suppose with the enlightenment generally, the idea did grow that if only we were a little, thought a little more clearly, we wouldn’t have to worry about these things, and the human race could stop wasting its efforts in doing so. I think a lot of sort of atheism has that kind of force in it. I’m afraid it turns out that it’s not that easy, you know, we’ve tried a good deal more thinking, but we still don’t know quite what to think. [laughs] And… So, one tends Mary Midgley Page 46 C1672/05 Track 4 to find oneself classed as being, what’s that word? obscurantist, you know, if you want to concentrate attention on it. And… Now what’s the fellow’s name who writes in the Guardian? Canon. [pause] Yes, they call it ‘Loose Canon’, a column in the Guardian. No? Can’t remember his name. You can’t remember his name?

No.

Never mind. Anyway, he, he writes a lot of rather lively stuff which goes in various directions, and that seems to me a reasonable thing to do at present you see, because we don’t know quite what to think. [pause] Yes, and the sort of, the sort of Protestants who went to America, I suppose a lot of them were rather anti-life, so to speak, and it’s, and people like Mark Twain could see there was something wrong with this. [laughs] And… [pause] But as I say, people do like having a row, if you ask why rows go on.

[31:17] Could I ask one more question, and that’s, how you manage to combine your work in reviewing, broadcasting, being a part-time academic, and being a mother, how you sort of, managed that.

Well, with difficulty, is the answer to that, as with many people. But I think there is quite a lot to be said for having too many irons in the fire by way of stimulating your thinking. You know, if people have only got one thing to think about, they’re much more likely to get stuck, going round and round. [pause] I mean I’m sure the answer is always, one’s been inadequate on this or that element in this map, but, and I’m, I’m not an exceptionally strong person, I do, have certainly found all this very tiring from time to time. But I think, I, I think, granted reasonable luck in your job and your colleagues, you know, this shouldn’t be an impossible sort of thing to do.

To what extent did you share domestic sort of work with, with Geoff?

Geoff wasn’t brought up to do it. [laughs] He could, he could just about make tea. I mean men have, men have changed you know, an awful lot, lately. But he didn’t Mary Midgley Page 47 C1672/05 Track 4 mind being left to boil himself an egg on occasion. And my boys, since they became of age, years of discretion, have been jolly helpful, and continue to be so.

What about sharing of sort of, picking the children up from school and that sort of thing, when you were both philosophers?

Yes. No, they went, they, one way and another, they went to boarding school and that was rather a help. Yah.

[end of session]

[End of Track 4] Mary Midgley Page 48 C1672/05 Track 5

[Track 5]

Could I start by asking some questions about your brother Hugh, that I didn’t ask last time?

Yah.

And that’s, whether he… You talked last time about yourself not being especially interested in science or natural history as a child. Was Hugh?

No. He studied history, he went to Cambridge and got a history degree, and got very interested in the history of art. So none of us, you see, was into science, and it wasn’t going on in the background. At least it was going on to this extent, that, I think my parents had a general idea of what scientists say now, and was probably right, I mean, my father was very clear about evolution, and he didn’t think that the Lord had to have created everything on Thursday or whatever it was. So, I wasn’t being misled about scientific facts, but they just didn’t crop up very much. Yes. And I was taught in a rather feeble way at school. The… I remember the physics, which we started, I suppose, when we were about seven, I thought this sounds rather exciting, and they explained it. But it turned out that it was all about doing your diagrams neatly, you know, and, and putting things in the passive, and so on. And, my education was extremely uneven in this sort of way, in that I had some first-rate people who really explained things, and some wasters of time I think who were harmless but, [laughs] you know… But this was unfortunate, it would have been a good thing if both maths and science had been taught a bit more.

What would have made the physics more exciting and engaging?

Well, anything can be more exciting than complaining about the drawing of the flask, and… [laughs] And, I mean she had obviously learnt it off by heart, you know, and, I mean if one is, if it’s explained that these are laws which govern everything, explain everything in a way, one gets excited, and people do, don’t they? So, I mean I, I think that, that was bad luck, but it’s, it can be summed up by saying, I had a humanistic education, and a good one, but it was one-sided. Mary Midgley Page 49 C1672/05 Track 5

[02:49] Is there a problem that, unless science makes these very big claims for itself, the sort of claims that you’ve done very well to counter, if it doesn’t do that, is there a danger that it is not very interesting, and that’s why it makes these big claims?

Well I think it should be halfway over. If people are telling you the truth and not some summary of the truth, you know. [laughs] I mean one thing I did enjoy, botany. The botany person used to bring in plants and we would take them to pieces, and it, that was all done in detail you see. Physics, I suppose, seemed to be very distant, but it was much more that the emphasis was on the bit that I couldn’t do, which was to make my story, essays and, and diagrams neat and, and obviously, this poor woman had been trained in that, and that’s what she was interested in. I mean it’s what the teacher’s interested in, isn’t it, that comes up, and I don’t think it’s hard to be interested in things about science, about physics and chemistry, as well as botany. I think that was just bad luck.

[04:13] I see. Thank you. Were there any sort of, animals in your childhood, either sort of, pets at home, or pets at school?

Well, at home, we always had dogs, one or two dogs, and usually one or two cats, and this was very much a matter of course, and they were quite important members, members of the family. But I didn’t have the intensive experience that people do if they live on farms, and so on. I think my parents had a very nice attitude to these creatures, and the creatures had a good attitude to us on the whole, that it, it was a, quite a good family for pets. And I suppose, I mean I… When did I really begin to think and worry about, about animals? I think… Half a minute. [pause] Yes, I think it was Konrad Lorenz, you see, I think he gives such a convincing account of the way that we are like and are connected with all these creatures, without telling any lies about it you know, he doesn’t say, they’re terribly clever or something, that isn’t the point. He says, their thinking is much less like ours than we tend to think, but that their feeling is much more so. And somehow that got in. So, now, his book came out sometime in the, during the war, didn’t it? King Solomon’s Ring. Yes. And my Mary Midgley Page 50 C1672/05 Track 5 parents got very excited about it, and I got excited about it too, you know, really, it struck me, looking at things in a different way. But I had this groundwork of, background of remembering Scottie and, that was… Scottie was [laughs], an enterprising Scots terrier, not of any particular breed really, but he could, he loved chasing motorbikes. [laughs] And of course, the poor motorcyclists, really didn’t like it. We had to stop him in the end, but it was so funny, and at first we quite encouraged it.

When you say that it was a good family for pets, what do you mean? What…

Well, I think that the attitude to them at the time, and the sort of, basic attitude that was there for, if one started to think in a more general way, was good. Yah. Yes, my mother’s parents always had dogs, and, a couple of dogs quarrelling is what they had. I don’t think they did it quite so well. My father’s parents didn’t have any in my time, because they lived in a flat in Piccadilly, and you don’t have flats – dogs in a flat. So, I mean it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a topic of conversation, but, a very humane attitude as taken for granted, and I think that’s true of a lot of people. Yah.

[07:48] Thank you. Last time you told me that at Oxford, partly through your friendship with Charlotte Williams-Ellis, you started to read more seriously books on animal behaviour.

Well, I, yes, I took in a whole lot of Charlotte from a sort of biological point of view, and what it was to look at things in that way. And I had some friends who were medical students too, and I picked up quite a lot from them. So it came as something new and interesting you see, not part of the syllabus but, but I could see that it mattered. Yah.

Did you read, as well as those, books in other areas of science or, or other, you know… So, the question is, why animal behaviour and not immunology or ecology or geography or…?

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Well I did pick up, I picked up quite a lot, and I call it picking up rather than reading in the subject, you know, and I, I was always on for some new subject which somebody told me was exciting you see, and I followed, followed other people around. They mostly hadn’t had as unbalanced an education as I had, so, I had friends at Somerville, and the papers, and so I read them I think, yes. My father used to take the Times, didn’t he; I can’t remember when we switched over to the Guardian. It was that sort of thing. We had the New Statesman, which had very good articles on an awful of things including science. I’m quite nostalgic about Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman, I don’t see anything like it now. Somebody we were just staying with had the Spectator. And I can see that it’s well written, but God it’s depressing, you know. [laughs] And, you know, the Guardian tells you things that are awful, but it makes some suggestions about what could be done, and that’s what the New Statesman used to do. It’s not a, a very ferocious argument going on, but these were all people who hoped that they could do something useful, you know? I suppose it’s partly that, I mean I was more credulous in those days. [laughs] Yes, so I, I picked things up from all sorts of places, but no specific place.

[10:34] Thank you. And can you tell me about your political outlook, activity, and/or engagement while at Oxford?

Well now, like I’ve told you, I was brought up with the internationalism of my parents’; we were constantly having Indians to stay and so on, and had some idea of world events. And I went up to Oxford in ’38, so by then, one was pretty much occupied with the next war and what we were going to do and so on. And, I was much relieved, and many of us were much relieved, to find that we’ve come in on the wrong side – on the right side, you know, because, these people who had the USSR as a demon, I mean it’s, a lot wrong with the USSR but not worth fighting it. [laughs] So, yes, I mean, I and, like most of my generation, were dithering at this point between strict pacifism and just wars, and I continued, as a lot of other people did, to dither about that for a long time. I’m just trying to remember the name, name… Yes, an institution called Just Defence, which tried to make it so you could, you see, only fight on a good occasion, I mean, a rather desperate cause, but… Yes. So I did that a lot, and talked about it a lot, and, never really resolved it. Mary Midgley Page 52 C1672/05 Track 5

[12:30] And can you tell me how your political views developed through our adult life?

It’s… Yes. I mean like a lot of people, I got rather used to the Labour Party being more or less where one should be, and I think I remained with that until Tony Blair started, you know, and… And, it, it did seem simpler. The trouble with the two-party system, it’s terribly crude. I mean it doesn’t, it doesn’t give you much solution to problems, but it is a centre for one’s life, you know, people, a lot people believe in the Conservative Party, and in the same sort of way I believed on the whole in the Labour Party. Subject to saying that somebody’s being pretty silly now, aren’t they, you know Tony Benn I could not always agree with,. [laughs] And, yes, when the trades unions became recognised as a menace, I can see that they were being a menace, and I wasn’t a bit surprised that they got jumped on. So I, you know, I, I wasn’t over hopeful, but I was, I did remain on that side. And what… I mean, I think, it’s not my business to theorise about it, but it seems to me that, what went on for a long time was that everybody really accepted the Marxist analysis of the class war, you see, those are the poor, and those are the rich, and we should even things up. And that lay behind the two-party system. The trouble is, people now don’t believe in that, so the Labour Party doesn’t know what it’s meant to believe in now. [laughs] And it seems to me, it was much more straightforward, and not perverse, to being… But one had some idea where it was going. So, I can’t tell you what’s happening next, but… By the way, we’ve got the curtains drawn because the sun is intolerable in the mornings, yes.

That’s fine.

Yes.

[14:58] In the autobiography, the Owl, you mention demonstrations.

Sorry, dem… Yes.

Mary Midgley Page 53 C1672/05 Track 5

Demonstrations. But apart from one, don’t tell us what they were. Could you give us a sense of the demonstrations that you were involved in?

I think they were anti-apartheid quite often, and they were quite often anti-nuclear. I remember doing a Nagasaki Day demonstration one time. [laughs] I put on my coat with the black lining outside, we were all supposed to be more or less, more or less in mourning. But, that’s the last one I did, because, I, you have to walk very slowly, and it really damaged my back to talk slowly, so I stopped.

And you took your children along to demonstrations?

I… [laughs] They tell me that I did, and I don’t, really don’t remember it. I think, Tom talking to the policemen, which, I wouldn’t have thought of doing. It’s quite a good idea, you know. [laughs] Yes. Yes, so we, that was when he was about twelve. I mean it was up to them whether they came, but they, they quite often did. Yes.

[16:15] And can you say a little bit more about your view of, of Thatcherism and then of New Labour?

Sorry, about Thatcher…?

Of Thatcherism, and then, after that I’ll ask about New Labour. But what was your view of…?

Well, from the start, Margaret Thatcher horrified us. What did she particularly horrify us about? I can hardly, [laughs] hardly remember now. Yes, it’s, free market stuff wasn’t the way we thought was any good going. [pause] It was plainly all pointed in the wrong direction, I mean, plainly from my, my position, didn’t want more of this. And, it was disappointing, because it followed a time when the Labour Party had been quite influential, that’s when the trades unions were doing their stuff, wasn’t it. [pause] Yes, I don’t think there’s anything subtle about my attitude to Margaret Thatcher. [laughs] No.

Mary Midgley Page 54 C1672/05 Track 5

And you stopped supporting Labour when it became New Labour?

I began to worry seriously, yes indeed. I, I dithered with my votes, and sometimes voted Liberal. But I didn’t, and still haven’t, got a line on what voting means these days. I think people are wandering all over the place.

[17:54] Thank you. Could you… We’re switching topics now. Could you expand on what appealed to you about the treatment of our souls in the work of the, is it… I apologise if I say this wrong, but, Plotinus? The…

Plotinus.

You studied a particular thinker for your, for you…

Plotinus [long i], yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And you worked on him from 1947 until at least into the early Fifties.

Mhm.

But, in the autobiography you say that he, his treatment of selves pointed out that, they were more complicated than we tend to think.

Yes.

But, could you… You don’t expand very much on what appealed to you about this particular thinker.

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Well, it’s… His ideas were like this, that everything is concentric, and in the middle there is, as it were, the one from which it all comes. But the layers are… You see, what you, what you at once encounter is your body, and then you encounter your intellect, and you sort of, in understanding things, you work inwards, you see. So this self is a sort of slice through all kinds of very different things, which accounts for why people can’t really lay it out very clearly and… But, you know, different cultures differ in what they think about it. The germs of this are in Plato I think already, but, Plotinus worked it out in detail and his psychology was often very shrewd I thought, even if you’re talking about how you will get stuck with the intellect and things like that, he was very sensible. I never finished all that properly. My supervisor was rather distant and shy and unhelpful, and it is a difficult subject because it involved the whole sort of philosophical history before Plotinus’ time, from Plato onwards, the Stoics and so on. So, it really required more actual teaching than I often got about it. But I still think that he was a great philosopher, and people should know about him. He’s a bit like Spinoza, you know, he’s able to bring things together rather than split them all apart. And you know, the opposition of mind and body is rather taken for granted by a lot of people. But these are sort of stages in getting inwards, seems to be a rather helpful way of talking, thinking.

[20:51] What were the different concentric layers then of the experience of the self? You’ve got the body and the intellect. What were the other…?

Well, then you are getting to the soul proper, and the soul has a number of different layers within it. This is the sort of thing that Buddhists go in for you see, and, meditating is part of it. So that in order to talk about these things intelligently, you do have to get there, if you see what I mean, and if each of us is composed of a sort of, concentric cake, and we can, we habitually live in the outer layers, but it is possible for us to shift, and we circle, and we all do to some extent, we can increase this lifting. Yes, some people were talking about Meister Eckhart the other day, and I think he went in for that. Meister Eckhart ring any bells with you?

No.

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He’s a mediaeval mystic, and he was very hostile to the idea of God. He said pray to God to be rid of God, because the more you get to this centre you see, the less you are concentrating on somebody out there. It’s a rather atheistic tendency. [laughs] Anyway, I thought this was jolly good, when I read the translations, and, as I probably told you, my teaching in Greek was really always inadequate, so I, I couldn’t follow it up as I would have liked to.

[22:44] How does your work on him influence your writings much later on subjects like evolution as a religion, science as salvation, are you an illusion, so on?

I think I absorbed quite early the idea that everything is really all one, you know, even if one doesn’t see the connection between, or not, to one’s, nature and man, you know, I mean we are a part of nature. And, one should always look for that sort of way of relating things. I think that’s probably, pervades my thoughts on all sorts of subjects. [pause] Yes, I mean, nobody taught us Espinoza, but you did pick up a moderately Spinozan sort of view, and that added, you know, the continuity of everything. [pause] I think I ought to take a pause, if that’s all right.

[End of Track 5] Mary Midgley Page 57 C1672/05 Track 6

[Track 6]

In terms of the concentric circles that we were just talking about, you said most people most of the time live in the outside, but you can get into the centre.

Yes.

Have you yourself felt that you’ve at times been able to get further towards the centre in…?

Yes. I think, I am constantly engaged in some effort to bring together different bits, you know, it’s not that one can see a centre to which one’s going to get, but that, conflicts are no good, so to speak. [telephone ringing] Oh.

[pause in recording]

Yes, you were saying that, you think you’re constantly engaged in an attempt to sort of move towards the centre of these concentric circles.

Yes. Well, yes, what I am engaged in is, resolving conflicts. I mean that’s how I think, think of it, that I see clash both of my own views and other people’s views, you see, and I always try to make sense of them by bringing them together. That’s the way it works. It isn’t a matter of thinking, now we must get into the middle as it were. But it does imply this background that everything is really one, you know, and I mean, I think many people accept that a conflict is ultimate and fixed and nothing can be done about it, much more than I do. I mean, you know, the antithesis between people and animals is one example, and there are quite a lot of, what do they call it? People who… There’s a human, human something, human something, convinced that humans are on top, and are really what it’s all for, you know. There’s a lot of that in our civilisation, and of course the amount of meat eating is something part of it. [laughs] I’m not, I don’t make it a central matter because I think, you know, it’s more what happens to the animals while they’re alive than after they are dead that matters. But, no, it shows how, how we just aren’t interested. And now you see I keep being surprised when people raise this question, are we alone? Meaning are there some Mary Midgley Page 58 C1672/05 Track 6 being up there? Well, we’re not alone, there’s plenty of beings around us, you know, we’re a part of a really complicated community. I think it’s a very perverse way to think, that this is just one of sort of gaps that I’m always trying to close. And you know, the background of it certainly is this notion that all is one. Which is not confined to Plotinus. As I say, you find it in Spinoza and to some extent in other philosophers. [pause] [03:13] Yes. And I mean, Plato left a lot of gaps to mend. The gap between mind and matter is pretty severe for Plato, but his, Plotinus took a lot of trouble to suggest how, how it could be mended, you know, how one could understand it. Yah.

[03:38] Thank you. Your children were born in 1950, 1953 and 1957.

Yah.

Could you say something about the role of caring for and observing children in the development, or perhaps just confirmation of your thoughts about human nature?

Yes. Well, that’s right. I always quite wanted children, that seemed to me to be a good way to go forward. And, the row between behaviourists and people who wanted there to be some kind of natural tendencies was going on very severely, and the, I mean, people took behaviourism to be particularly scientific, which I don’t think it is, you know, [laughs] it’s just, just one more bad philosophy. But, I think I said, put something, a note, in Beast and Man that I have found it useful to have these examples of animal behaviour on the rug, you know. And, it makes it more, makes it more realistic, because the difference about children is, not that they aren’t very good at things, well they aren’t very good at quite a lot of things, but, but, the same motivation is coming out through a quite different background, and I, I think that simply seeing them when they were small, felt very instructive. Yah.

What specific memories do you have of them as young children?

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[pause] Yes, [laughs] it’s just, reminding Tom that when he went to school in West Jesmond School, he said how practical it was that the West Jesmond School was next to the cemetery, because if a child were to die during school, that… [laughs] He, he was inclined to make that sort of remark. [pause] I… Yah, I mean I would have to remember all the stories, wouldn’t I. Yes, I mean, the elder two are eighteen months apart, two chaps, and that resulted in them quarrelling a great deal, and they exploited their quarrels in such a way that when I asked one of them to do something, he’d say, ‘Why you pick on me?’ [laughs] you see, so… And all that was quite difficult. Then after four years Martin arrived, and was an extremely soothing baby. He had… They both took to him, and they, that was a centre for their interests you see, and I was impressed to find that the whole thing became quite harmonious. [laughs] I mean, I hadn’t done it on purpose so to speak, but, but it worked well. Yes, I mean, I keep reading these bits of Guardian about families, you know, and the awful times people have, but I do think on the whole I’ve been rather lucky, that I quite recognise the, the messes that we all get into. And of course it’s very frightening, particularly at first when you don’t realise that they’ll probably get over whatever it is and start to sleep properly and so on. Yes, I hadn’t had a lot to do with small children at all before, and, you know, certainly nor had my husband, so we, we had our learning to do, but that’s common enough. [pause] Yes, I mean, I’m doing right, am I, in saying that after this twenty minutes, you will go away for a little time, or…?

And then come back. Yes.

Yes. I mean that…

[08:08] Yes. How did you yourself find the change from being really at the beginning of an academic career to being a full-time mother, how did you find that socially and psychologically?

Well, I rather took it for granted and didn’t get too excited about it. As I say, I had always liked the idea of having children, and, there seemed to be plenty to do. And the community of academics at the university here was much more closer and more friendly, there were much fewer of them. And my husband was into the dramatic Mary Midgley Page 60 C1672/05 Track 6 society and I got into the dramatic society. You know, it… I never, I never had a notion of an academic career running in front of me that had suddenly gone, you know. I just wanted to go on doing the things that I want to do. And I was much more occupied with writing and, I mean I certainly never, never bothered to chase jobs. Life was easier you know, [laughs] in lots of ways. I mean these days, you, in order to get any job you have to have published in a journal with, peer review journal, isn’t it. Yes. So people are always having to publish before they know what they think. And this was not so. I could write what I felt like writing, and on the whole people printed it. And, there were a number of small periodicals all over the place. So, I didn’t really go, get a conflict there. I tell you, I don’t like conflicts. [laughs] And, I didn’t have a point at which I had to renounce something. I did, obviously, find it inconvenient that the children kept me occupied a great deal, and I failed to do things which I would have quite liked to do, but I was prepared for that you see. And by this time, my first two had more or less grown up you know, and, one isn’t so surprised. And that’s what I notice about a lot of people, that they seem to have been taken by surprise by the fact that it’s a lot of trouble bringing up children and so forth, and I don’t think I went through that stage. And I think it’s possible that my parents, who both got married rather late, had already worked that one out so to speak, and I mean, there’s been an illusion about, about youth and what it does for you, hasn’t there, in the last, fifty years really. I don’t think they ever shared that one. And, I mean, this is part of a, a sort of bogus optimism that has grown up over the years, that people assume that things will get better and better, and that they will be successful, you know. The American notion is, every American is successful, isn’t it. Well where do you put them all? [laughs] I mean, I do see that it helps, that the Americans are much more enterprising about jobs and so on, but, if you believe it, and then you are unemployed, it’s very depressing isn’t it. Yes, I mean, none of these, I haven’t been put through any of these strains, because it has been quite easy for me to go on doing what I like, which is writing and talking and being out with my friends, without any institution objecting to this.

[12:26] When you were, when you were looking after young children, you were writing reviews of books, you were taking part in broadcasts, you were writing articles and so on. Mary Midgley Page 61 C1672/05 Track 6

Yes.

The question that I think the listener will be interested in from a modern perspective is, how did it happen, how, you know, who invited you to do it, how did it all come about, how were you able to do that?

Well, my Oxford tutor, Donald McKinnon, put the Third Programme on to me, and we do have to say that the BBC was itself much more intellectual in those days. I mean it wasn’t… I did give twenty-minute talks, a review of Bertrand Russell’s latest book. I don’t think you would get twenty minutes now. So, and that sort of thing, that’s the sort of way it happened. But by the time I left college, I was, I had a lot of friends who were engaged in journalism of one kind and another, and, I didn’t think it a big deal, you know, and that’s proved very handy. [13:37] I’m just reading Dickens’s letters. Oh he is an interesting fellow. And he kept incredibly busy, writing an awful lot of things at once, and you think, wouldn’t it be better to leave this till later? No. [laughs] No. And, I think that… And then on a smaller scale, I think that’s how I felt, that I’ve a lot of stuff to write, you know. So, when the… Yes, my first book I wrote, Beast and Man, that, I mean that was a bit of an exceptional contact, because, Max Black, philosopher, had invited me to Cornell, because he had picked up my article on beastliness, and he was just, he was, you know, he had an organisation which was a very, a very inclusive sort of science and philosophy organisation. It was quite separate from the Cornell philosophy department who didn’t wish to know about it [laughs], you see. But it was, it was a great opportunity for me, because he fixed up occasions for me to talk to all the different specialists, anthropologists and chemists and, you know, he was very much in sympathy with my wish to bring everything together. And, I mean once I … That book was a reasonable success at its own level, because, because it was reconciling a gap. Because, you see, and what everybody was excited about at that moment was the sociobiology debate, you see, you had to either follow what, all that Dawkins line, or say there was no human nature, and that behaviourists had it right. So it’s remained, not a big success, but a tolerable success on its own level, by doing that. So that did set the scene quite conveniently for me to go on bringing things together, you know. Mary Midgley Page 62 C1672/05 Track 6

You see, these titles. [pause] I can’t remember. Yes. I’ve got this awful damage to my memory from the operation, from the anaesthetic of the operation that I had a couple of years ago, and it’s the, names are really hard to remember. [laughs]

Are you thinking of this?

Mm?

Were you thinking of that? This book.

That’s right. Evolution as a Religion. And what’s the other one?

Science As Salvation.

Science As… Yes, that’s right. These are ostentatiously bringing things together. And I think it is important to do it ostentatiously. Such success as I've have had I think has hinged on this, because, people do have a whole lot of thoughts which don’t fit together, you know. [pause] And sometimes they are trained to think that they won’t fit together. I mean, Marxism used to have people very fixed to their, these doctrines, and they could quarrel about what the doctrines were, and that went on. But, but it is, it is really hard I think for many people to, to bring things together, they, people are harmonious, and I think I’ve, that’s what I’ve helped probably people to do. You’re, you’re making me think more about what I [laughs], about what I may be able to, to have done, and I think, that’s probably quite important.

[18:05] When you say that people have ideas that don’t fit together, is that an observation made by reading sort of, academic or semi-academic books, or is it an observation made by, just living, listening to people, talking to people?

Well both. Yes, happens all the time. People, certain… People have got conflicting ideas, and it doesn’t occur to them to shift that one, [laughs] you know. And I mean there are quite a lot of people who are trying to make a better harmony of life, it is Mary Midgley Page 63 C1672/05 Track 6 part of, part of what intellectual life is I think, that, they look for ways of, of combining things.

Well, I’m thinking, are you someone who, perhaps for example when you were looking after your children and going about the place visiting things, did you tend to, like an author sometimes does, listen to people talking and observe people, and this became, if you like, sort of, data for your books?

Well, I think so, but only at the level that an awful lot of people do. I am not Dickens, you know, I wouldn’t… But I do pick things up, yes. Yes.

[19:23] And you said that MacKinnon put you on to the Third Programme.

Yes.

What other contacts did you have at the time, in the early Fifties when you were looking after children, and you were doing this, what would now be called sort of, media work, be it was then more, as you say, more -?

Yes, I usually started with reviewing people, they would send me a book to review, and they liked what I said. But, you know, I can’t remember how it started with The Nineteenth Century and After, you know, do you know this periodical? Yes. But I can’t remember how it started, but it probably was reviewing something. And, the point is, editors have got to find someone to review, haven’t they, and, this is quite infectious. So, it goes on. But, [laughs] the only trouble is, you consent to review a book and find it’s 700 pages and terribly dull. [laughs] So… But I did do a lot of reviewing, and I think that was probably quite, quite good practice as it were.

[20:29] What sorts of reviewing or writing or broadcasting work would you turn down?

[pause] Well it took a lot to make me turn it down. I reviewed novels for quite a time for the New Statesman. And I certainly tended to view the offer a book as a Mary Midgley Page 64 C1672/05 Track 6 challenge. If I, I would have to, I will have to think about turning… But I mean, if I have any suspicion that this is 700 dull pages, I’m not going to do it. And I… Or that it’s too big for me, you know, and it’s things about principles of physics, no. I quite… But about human life in general, I, yes. And the New Statesman for quite a time had been doing the feminism.

[21:26] And who else were your contacts in this world that derived from Oxford? You said that you, you left Oxford with a sort of, number of contacts in the…

Well, Iris Murdoch, and, you know, Charlotte went off to… No, Charlotte went to Cambridge, that’s right, so I remained in touch with her. Elizabeth Anscombe. Have I talked about her at all?

A little bit, yes.

Yes.

But not in this sort of context.

I mean she’s a, she is dead now isn’t she. She was a strange character, and, most impressive, but inclined to behave badly and childishly, and, you know, shout at people. But I never minded that, because, I could understand it. Yes, she went to Cambridge, that’s right, and I used to visit her there. Who else was there? [pause] Yes, I mean, there were quite a lot of chaps who I was then in touch with. And, [laughs] Tony Flew, notoriously one couldn’t get rid of Tony Flew. [laughs] He remained in everybody’s life. [pause] I can’t really remember people in detail, but I, I had an impression, the generation of graduate students that I belonged to, which is the people who came up after the war, was a rather good generation, because it’s a lot of people who had been doing something completely different. Strawson and J J C Smart, and so forth. Strawson, the younger Strawson is just taking up strange positions, isn’t he, that’s Strawson’s son, is. Oh what’s his name? Never mind. Yes, I mean, graduate classes were very good and very educative. And I kept up with some of these people from time to time, but I, it was… I would have kept up more Mary Midgley Page 65 C1672/05 Track 6 with iris if I hadn’t moved out to Newcastle and she was still in Oxford. And I probably told you somewhere, Iris went off philosophy, said, ‘I’m going to stop doing philosophy,’ because she, the Oxford philosophy was so narrow, you know, this sort of, Saturday morning class in which only the best and greatest would take part, place. So she went and wrote novels instead. Now, I think she was rather a good philosopher, and I’ve always been sorry that, that this occurred. And you see, Isaiah Berlin did the same thing. That’s what makes me see it’s not just something about Iris. He had a notice on his desk, it seems, 'Austin' [reference to JL Austin] - he'd pinched it from a garage, to remind him always to be more precise, you see. Well, this isn’t a good idea, and it led to his eventually saying, ‘I don’t do philosophy; I only do the history of philosophy.’ And I think, Isaiah Berlin was a serious loss, really, it should not have happened. But when we were all in Oxford, we were not going on like this most of the time. Who else did I keep in touch with? There must have been people in London. [pause] I’m sorry, a tendency to lose spasm, bits of one’s life you know, some bits are easy to remember and others are not.

[25:48] In the autobiography, the sort of contacts that you mention in journalism, they’re not necessarily people who were friends of yours before, but you, you mention Janet Smith at the New Statesman.

Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And, someone with the surname Kallin at the Third Programme? Is it Aniouta Kallin, at the Third Programme?

Yes.

These were people…

That’s right. She was, she was a producer, and she produced my talks repeatedly, and she liked them, and she shared a great deal of my view I think. She was Russian, which may have helped. [pause]

Mary Midgley Page 66 C1672/05 Track 6

Because? Why might that have helped?

Well, because she was educated widely. [laughs] She… There’s a lot of Russian sages talking about how everything is one, aren’t there? You know, it’s sort of… And I, she was very encouraging to me, and very helpful. And I may have put somewhere in… There’s only one occasion when she turned down a talk of mine, and, this was a talk about the marital lives of philosophers, how almost all of them never married, you see. I said, this is really quite significant, but Aniouta Kallin thought this is gossip. [laughs] She wouldn’t… She… But she, she was a splendid person, and, I remember she came to visit my parents once or twice and was sort of, extremely friendly. You see, the Third Programme is something unimaginable now, it was really serious. You could talk about anything. So I mean, that’s one way that I kind of got into the intellectual life of the times. I can’t think… Janet Adam Smith, yes, I don’t know how I started at the New Statesman, but it certainly will have been with a review, and then after a bit they came to think, well, let’s give Mary that. I don’t know who sent it to… [laughs] But… Yes. [pause] So those were the, I suppose… And, that, and the Twentieth Century people, they were my main, main outlets. But I think I wrote for a lot of mags that don’t really remember now.

[28:30] Do you remember whether relations between science and religion, do you remember whether that was a topic that you wrote about at this, in this early period?

I don’t think… I think for a long time I was rather shy about religion. Not that I don’t think it’s important; I don’t think I understand it, you see. So I, I did not tend to do that. But, the bad relations between science and religion, that I did comment on from quite early on. [pause]

[29:09] What was Geoff’s view of your writings and broadcasts?

Well he didn’t mind it, so to speak. In fact I think as time got on, he, he came rather to enjoy it. But he got very obsessed with computers, and I don’t know what he was sitting there doing with his computer, you know, a lot of the time. He had his own Mary Midgley Page 67 C1672/05 Track 6 philosophical views which were very sensible, and so, on the whole I shared most of them. Yah, we, people used to think we would be talking philosophy over supper, but we weren’t much, you know, only when it came up.

Did he read your reviews and listen to your broadcasts and comment?

I… I think everybody, all my friends listened to the broadcasts, but how much they read the reviews, I don’t know, but… [laughs] It was, it was quite a natural thing to do, because everybody was reading the New Statesman and these other papers. [pause]

[30::25] What was Geoff’s view of science? I ask because he seemed to have a similar wartime experience to the other scientists I’ve interviewed, sort of, work on radar…

He was a boffin.

Yes.

Yes, he was a boffin. And obviously enjoyed being a boffin, and learnt in the process a lot of science, which he continued to talk about. But he was worried, equally with me, about the literacy of scientists, you know, this conflict between, supposed conflict between science and religion on the rest of life. Yah. Talked about, when we first got together, and, I don’t know what it is, some… After we had been, been at one of these graduate classes, and somebody brought Geoff round to see me, and we ate, got out a pork pie and remained the rest of the day, [laughs] talking about it. Yes, I mean he was, he was very very well aware of, as it were, needing to change things. He was then coming out of a positive Christian phase, and he used to say, I’d say, ‘Why are you coming out of it?’ He said, ‘Well, one day I realised, I looked at my diary, and it said, ‘Seven o’clock, rise. Rise?’ [laughs] you see. Get up. Something bogus about the, the sort of, the sort of Christianity that was going on in, in college, and he, he always remained interested in it but, he got pretty hostile to the C of E.

[32:24] Mary Midgley Page 68 C1672/05 Track 6

Can you expand on his concerns about the literacy of scientists, or of science?

Yes. Well, I mean, the kind of thing that we now have when Stephen Hawking thinks we can colonise the stars, you know. Stephen Hawking is bit special, because he’s obviously very good at what he does. But the, the sort of crude materialism that makes it impossible to be aware of one’s own awareness so to speak, you know, that’s, that’s such bad philosophy and used to annoy him. Yes. [pause] And human exceptionalism, that’s the name, isn’t it, for humans being so special and different. Yes, quite a lot of things like that annoyed him. So I mean I think he shared this wish to bring things together, to see them as harmonising, not… Yah. Without distorting.

[33:42] What made you decide to begin to write for the journal Philosophy in the early Seventies, having not done so before?

Well, it’s exceptional among philosophical journals in that it’s written and meant to be read by people who aren’t professional philosophers, and so I, feeling strongly that everything ought to be intelligible with the whole of oneself you know, not just by a special little person up there that does philosophy. So, when I began to think I had something to say, which was indeed about beastliness, that’s where I sent it. And it went down quite well, and I continued to send in for just the same reason you know, and I never - Mind, how do you read Mind? You know?

Mm.

And so on. I mean, I didn’t want philosophy to be something that’s only done by specialists. I felt it’s something that everybody ought to do. I mean like everybody takes English literature, you know, at school, they enjoy it, [laughs] and far too many people take it at college, and then they find that what they’ve got is, is scholarly, you know, scholarly investigations of influence and so on. But history similarly, it is known that everybody ought to know some. It isn’t a speciality that you have to look up and get something. I mean, I’m quite tickled, and, everybody’s so excited about Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels, which I think are awful , but, people are so, people do feel that they ought to know the politics of Henry VIII’s reign I think, and, they’ve Mary Midgley Page 69 C1672/05 Track 6 got… and, you know, we used to have, we used to have too much glorifying of Thomas More. So, she’s nasty about Thomas More, she can’t be bothered to get in the middle, you know? And Anne Boleyn, she didn’t follow it really. But I mean, I, I’ve always enjoyed reading history one way or another, and I similarly think that a lot of people can enjoy reading Philosophy if it’s the kind that they can read, and that one particular periodical, I think it still does it, is, aims to do that, and I think is, is humane and necessary.

[36:48] Thank you. And can you remember who exactly invited you to join the Science and Religion Forum?

[pause] Now, I should be able to, shouldn’t I, but I doubt whether I can. I knew several people who were in it. It could have been MacKinnon, Donald MacKinnon, my tutor.

He was in it?

No, I don’t think he was. But he was very much concerned about people talking to each other, and he… [pause] No, I’m sorry, there must be important people there who I cannot now remember the name of quite.

And, you said that you knew several people who were in it.

Yes. I think that’s true. Well all the time I, I worked with it, didn’t I, for a time, I was chair. I must have known who everybody was, and I don’t think there’s much I can do about it now, but… [pause] I mean, there were always a lot of people who were interested in religion who were worried by it, you know. [noises in background] [sound of post] Is this Martin? - with her downstairs, so that’s quite a good thing [regarding Son Martin's visit]. Yah.

And, so a lot of people were interested and worried about it, you…?

Mary Midgley Page 70 C1672/05 Track 6

Yes, yes. I mean if you, if you’ve got to deal with the creeds, you’ve got to think about when you take them literally. This was the time, wasn’t it, when intellectuals who went religious went into the Catholic Church, Edith Sitwell and Waugh, and, you know, this was, this was a, a move quite frequently made. But, this involved taking the view of the literalness of the creeds and so forth, which many of us couldn’t take. And I was always unhappy about that. Equally, a lot of people joined the Communist Party, just the same trouble that, it wasn’t optional that you, you know, believed in this or that, you know, it was… [pause]

[End of Track 6] Mary Midgley Page 71 C1672/05 Track 7

[Track 7]

Could you tell me about the writing of Evolution as a Religion?

Ah.

And… Yes, in general, and then I’ll ask you something in particular.

Yes. Well as I said in that book, it was, I was being asked for a talk for a conference on evolution and religion, and so then I thought, evolution as a religion. And that book will show that, quite a lot cropped up, and continued in the other one. And this was very much an example of me bringing things together, wasn’t it, people hadn’t really considered that the sort of bad scientistic thinking that was going on went on as if it was a religion, it was sort of compulsory. And I think that that is still true, that today people think that what we must believe is what scientists tell us, you know, people, it doesn’t matter much whether you go to church or not, but you must take the current view of physics seriously, you know. I think that shift, that shift had already become quite marked by the… So that was what enabled me to write those books. And they are both books I’m rather pleased to have written, because I think it was a job that needed, two of them needed doing.

Could you just expand on that? It was a job that needed doing. What was, what was at stake in not failing to do it, if you like?

That people were drifting into thinking that, that this cast of scientists was, had the authority over life in general, that one should expect to follow their advice. And of course, scientists can have all kinds of political and moral stances, there’s no reason at all to suppose they get things right. And, there was a quite positive atheistic movement, wasn’t there, starting in America in the 1880s or some such time, because of course they were getting much too much religion [laughs], you could understand it. But, that involved distorting the story about religion. And, I mean, once you’ve distorted it, you don’t take it seriously any longer, so you are going to take something else seriously, so it becomes, materialism becomes, rather central to people’s lives you know, and if they are confronted with questions about telepathy, or psycho - Mary Midgley Page 72 C1672/05 Track 7 people moving things, you know, or what they now consider to be psi- topics, they think it’s got to be wrong. They haven’t got to be wrong. It’s very irrational to think, [laughs] think it’s wrong. [03:34] I find it particularly tiresome about telepathy, because I think one, everybody experiences telepathy going on, don’t they? [laughs] I certainly do. Well, you are thinking about something and wondering if you should say it, and somebody else does. And, I, I think there is also quite an impressive number of messages from a distance. You know, somebody dies in Australia and somebody here has a bad dream. And, and one can say, oh they’re all anecdotal so to speak, but then they would be, wouldn’t they? I think, it’s very, it’s really irrational to object to this. Yes, I ought to stop a bit now.

[End of Track 7] Mary Midgley Page 73 C1672/05 Track 8

[Track 8]

Where are we?

Can I ask more about Evolution as a Religion, in particular where you looked to get the science that you are challenging in that book? So, did you read journals or, or talk to scientists, or observe scientists?

Well I had already read a lot from books and journals, so I, this is very much my habit, to find what I disagree with put in a clear sort of way and quote it. So I, if you were to look at the references in that book, you would find where I got them, because I, it’s the result of, of collecting over a long time. And I mean of course I had got very interested in evolution, and what it was, and so on, so I naturally did read quite a lot of stuff. I mean, my reading of journals is very selective. I get interested in a particular journal, I follow it sometimes, but it’s mostly, look at it because, because one understands that it’s got something in that, or you know somebody else, somebody else refers to it. And I mean it’s not, it’s not just, as it were, a hostile move, I wasn’t trying to find things to do them harm; it’s what I am finding that already does them harm, you know, and I was fairly shocked at a lot of the things that I put in there [Evolution as a Religion]. And, so I think I said in the later one, I, I really didn’t go for the physicists in the earlier one, because I was sufficiently occupied with biologists, you know, it, , it the whole [pause] Yes, I mean, the Dawkins story essentially… [pause] And it turned out that clearly quite a lot of people had also been looking in both directions so to speak, these books have continued to be quite popular and I think they should be, because I mean, they brought these problems together, people were having separate problems about religion and how to treat science, and… [pause] Yes, Sociobiology you see, really occupied people for a long time, and it is a large, heavy, impressive book, so, [laughs] you know, 700 pages. Yes, and E O Wilson, you see, who wrote that, has now totally changed his stance, even took the trouble to say so lately, didn’t he. Yes. Yes, and, I met him in America in some conference or other, and he was quite nice to me, and I was quite nice to him, because what I had said in Beast and Man was very fair, you know, he was quite happy with that. But I got the impression then of two embattled tribes, you know, and, once an academic becomes signed up for an embattled tribe, Mary Midgley Page 74 C1672/05 Track 8

[laughs] and then to go on… So I, I’m impressed with the way he has moved, he’s moved over a long time, and I’m not just referring to his saying that Dawkins isn’t a scientist. You know this story? Well, somebody was interviewing Wilson, and asking what he had done and said, and they said, ‘And do you oppose what Professor Dawkins is now saying?’ And Wilson said, ‘I only oppose scientists,’ you see. [laughs] [background noises]

[04:57] Some of the books that you refer to in Evolution as a Religion might be, might fairly be called popular science books, or books that are attempting to popularise science.

Oh yes. Very often they are, yes.

So, is it possible that the final chapters that you refer to, where you say that the scientists really let themselves go in making exaggerated claims for science…

Yah.

Could that be a symptom just of the kind of popularisation of science movement where scientists feel that they have to try and engage their audiences by making these claims? So that there’s a difference between the scientists actually…

I’m sure they’d say so. But you don’t write that kind of nonsense unless you enjoy writing that kind of nonsense. I mean it’s spontaneously coming out, you know. [laughs] I, I thought about that when I’ve dealt with those questions, and I don’t think they, they're not as subtle as that - the thought that we ought to teach them, the proles to think this and to - isn't theirs. And you see, I mean, [laughs] it’s very boring, writing a lot of this, these books here; I mean the main book may be very boring to write, but you are looking forward to revealing your vision. I think these are genuine revelations of people’s visions, and that’s why, one reason I worry about them. They’re thinking of- I mean, this space colonisation is a central example of this, that people don’t just think, well perhaps it might be done one day; they think, ooh, let’s get this going. You know, it, it, it’s, it’s at a deeper level than the rest of the book. Mary Midgley Page 75 C1672/05 Track 8

And it seems to me very likely that that that part of the book gets remembered when the rest does not.

[06:58] Do you detect this sort of thing going on in scientific journals in a, in a smaller, a different, more subtle way?

Well you see, I don’t often… I only read a journal, as I say, if there’s some reason, because I think that a particular article is interesting. But I do take New Scientist, and it goes on in New Scientist far too much, I think it’s, it’s really rather scandalous. I’ve worked a bit with New Scientist and at one time I asked them why they had got such awful people to do things about the mind and so forth, and they said, well… The girl who I talked to wasn’t on the tops as it were, but she said, ‘Well there’s this group of people in California who are called science writers, who they think are, they know all this, and it doesn’t occur to them to look for the philosopher or…’ [laughs] And, yes, so I think there is a great unevenness, and if your public is chiefly a public of scientists, you simply may not think at all about the standard of the non-scientific part of the book. And if you do think about it, you may be rather dumb, I think. Because, the standard of the, the fantasies that are quoted seems to me to be low. But it, it’ll depend on the public you are thinking about, won’t it, and… [08:42] Yes, well, there’s this current New Scientist, and it’s quite a good example.

Oh yes, let’s look at that. Is it…

It’s here.

Ah.

Yes, that’s right. Yah, you look on the outside of that, and see what they claim to be doing.

Mary Midgley Page 76 C1672/05 Track 8

‘Ten discoveries that will transform what it means to be human: we came from outer space, the future is predictable, intelligence is useless, there’s no free will, the universe is an illusion, and more.’ What was… You’ve read this issue?

Sorry?

You’ve read this issue, have you?

I read it, because I take an interest in bad science, and I mean, it isn’t science actually at all, you know, this is just bad philosophy. Because they haven’t got any way of discovering, as a fact, that we have, the universe is an illusion, you know, that’s not science. They, they don’t know that they… They’re doing something that can’t be done. ‘The future is predictable.’ Yes. [pause] Yes, I, [laughs] one of them seems to me to be a simple sort of error. Yes. ‘These questions transform what it means to be human.’ ‘If we came from outer space.’ Well no, [laughs] I can’t see it makes the slightest difference. But then if you are obsessed with the subject, yes, and, ‘The universe is an illusion’? You know, these are not scientific discoveries that can be made. This is an example of… And what doesn’t happen a lot the time in New Scientist but does quite often, I think there’s always something, yes-.

[10:22] That raises again the question, whether the problem is with science, or with attempts to make science exciting, which must be the agenda…

Well, I think the trouble is with science education, it’s not that they are taking an option that they think might bring people in. It’s, they’re going on doing what’s been done for them. And, I’m sure there’s a great deal more of that kind of stuff in popular science books which people obviously start with, don’t they. And, you sometimes find it in articles in the newspapers, but it’s, it’s a sort of, law that forms a background to people’s scientific notions, and often I think an exciting background. It’s… Space colonisation seems to me an obvious idiocy, but I, [laughs] it doesn’t seem so to them.

[11:39] Mary Midgley Page 77 C1672/05 Track 8

The kind of writing that you’re criticising in Evolution as a Religion, which was published in the Eighties, did that strike you then as a rather new kind of literature being written by scientists?

Yes, I thought, I didn’t see anybody else doing it. And, it may well have been done under other titles, but I didn’t see any books that were called it I think.

Mm.

Yah.

Because, what’s thought to be the Public Understanding of Science movement started about that time.

Yes.

And, so, I wonder whether it has encouraged this kind of writing from scientists, if you see what I mean.

I’m trying to remember what that in general was. The only thing I chiefly remember about it is that Dawkins got to be Professor of the Public, [laughs] Public Understanding of Science, which didn’t give me a very good impression. [talking to son Martin] Sorry Mart, do you happen to remember what, how those, the movement for the Public Understanding of Science came up in the Eighties I think?

MARTIN: No, but I can find out.

There was a report in 1985 by the Royal Society which was called the Bodmer Report, which was written by Walter Bodmer, which is often seen as having kicked it off, which is a report arguing how important it was for everyday citizens to understand science in order to conduct their lives, and I suspect that the, I’m not sure whether it was a Royal Society funded position, but I suspect that Richard Dawkins’ position came out of that, in a spurious way.

Mary Midgley Page 78 C1672/05 Track 8

Got his job from that. Yes. I mean, this will largely have been people who know what science is, and think it should be more widely spread. Yes. But of course it also picks up the people who want us to tell the science and myths.

Could you…

Like Mr Chickramasinghe, or whatever it is. Was it…

Wickramasinghe, yes.

Yes.

I see.

Panspermia

[13:44] Because, I mean I… The Francis Crick book that you used to some extent in there, without having done a detailed study myself, I should imagine that his scientific papers differ very significantly from the kind of writing that he…

Yes, I shouldn’t think he goes on like that in his scientific papers. But he knows it’s not the right thing to do. I mean, you know, it, you don’t, your reputation is not increased by citing visions, but once you are as famous as Crick is, you’re allowed to.

[14:23] Thank you. Could you tell me about the origin and development of your friendship with James Lovelock?

Ah, well, I picked up the Gaia, little Gaia book that came out, very early, I suppose before 1970, and at once I found this very impressive. So, I started talking about it when I talked about other things. And at some point, what I was saying and writing got through to Lovelock, who was understandably pleased because he wasn’t getting appreciated by everybody. You know there’s an extraordinary sort of, resistance to Mary Midgley Page 79 C1672/05 Track 8 the whole thing being science, which it plainly is. So we became very friendly, but, geography was against us you see, we are rather distant. I did go and stay with him a couple of times when he was in Cornwall. Now he’s gone to Dorset, which is almost as far. Yes, I mean I, I have long taken the view that he is an extremely important scientist, that if you, in a way, you go on from Darwin, you get there, you know, the unity, yes all my bias to the unity of things you see, it goes with all this very well. But, there isn’t the hostility to him now that there was at one time, but, he only isn’t appreciated on the level that he ought to be, I’m sure. I got rather cross, we went to his ninetieth birthday party, and people were making speeches about all sorts of other things and not about what a good scientist he is. [laughs]

Like what? What annoyed you about…?

Mm?

What annoyed you about what some of them were saying?

Well I thought… You celebrate somebody’s ninetieth birthday with a large party in, where was the place? Oh. A large party in… In a grand house. You should say, what you say about that person is so important. Were you there Mart?

MARTIN: No, no no I wasn’t.

No. Yes. Yes. The point is, he himself didn’t think of himself as having great stature, but everybody does, at least everybody who knows what he’s doing. Yah.

Do you have memories of particular conversations with him over the course of your friendship that would help the listener to understand ways in which your thinking and his thinking map?

Well I, I don’t think I have any particular ones on the whole. We had a number of conversations where we found we largely agreed. But of course he’s, he’s a bit… Now what is it he can’t stand? He can’t stand wind power. He doesn’t believe in all those things. And he’s a rather tribal fellow once he gets, he signs up for something. Mary Midgley Page 80 C1672/05 Track 8

[laughs] So I don’t talk to him about wind power. And, I mean, my view of him is that he’s terribly good on these vast cosmic subjects, but he is not a political animal, and he’s not much interested in ordinary politics. You see, the one person he was pleased with was Margaret Thatcher, and he was quite rightly pleased with her, because she was one of the… She, she took him seriously. She, she just really, mentioned what he called for. So he thought she was splendid. And, somehow, this question came up, and I said it was a pity she had put beggars back on the streets of London, and he said, ‘Oh, did she?’ You know, I mean, he didn’t know what else she was up to, and he didn’t need to, you know? I mean, you don’t go to him for party political guidance [laughs], but he e has, I think, a quite exceptional grasp of ways of thinking of the cosmos. Yah.

[18:59] And could you do something similar now for your, the origin and development of your friendship with Jane Goodall?

Well, I… Yes, it’s a long time since I’ve seen Janey Goodall. It’s the same sort of thing. She came and gave talks. Half a minute, did I go and visit her somewhere? Yes I think I did visit her somewhere. But not in America, which is where she now lives, isn’t it. Yes, and we discussed her experiences and the difficulty that she was having in getting established as a scientist, you know. When she started, started to write, she didn’t give her chimps names, she gave them numbers, you see. And her tutor explained that that was the right way to go, and she said she didn’t think it was. [laughs] And it seems that, some other people who have observed chimps have pointed out that you can remember it better with names, that this wasn’t held to, to matter, you see. I mean, it really is interesting. If you were studying a group of humans, you probably wouldn’t make them A, B and C, you know. [laughs] But, Jane Goodall shifted, shifted that position a great deal I think, and she was really being quite brave in doing so. She was helped by Leakey, wasn’t she, yes, the older Leakey. He got hold of her, and also Dian Fossey, and the one whose name I can never remember who did the Eastern stuff. And I think it was great acuteness of him, but she had got the acuteness there to use it. I mean I… Yes, so I, I kept in touch for some time, I used to go and visit her occasionally. But again, geography has rather Mary Midgley Page 81 C1672/05 Track 8 been against me you see. I think, occasionally she comes here, but it, you can’t rely on it. But she, she’s had the right sort of influence I think and is continuing to.

[21:36] Could you tell me about your work on the RSPCA’s Committee on Animal Experimentation?

Yes. Yes, I was on that for some years, I should think ten years. And it was of course riven with conflicts. And the difficulty of finding the level that it’s any good campaigning for, you know, not just wasting your energies and sounding extreme, but, yah. So there were a lot of different detailed rows going on about what you could do to pigs and so on, and I found myself in the middle of this two-party arrangement. And so, I mean it was a, it was a fairly typical experience of what goes on in working for charities, particularly animal charities, but, I think some progress was being made. I can’t remember quite what was changed about calves, that, certainly improved about calves, and as far as I remember it improved a bit about pigs. They were trying to get pigs something to do, you know. Pigs are very intelligent. And it’s really an awful thought that, I mean, quite as intelligent as dogs, they’re tied up in these traps. Yes. Yes, I mean as I say, my view has always been that what matters is what you do to them when they’re alive. I am not too concerned about whether they get eaten after they’re dead, and I don’t think they are so to speak. There’s a thing called Compassion in World Farming, do you know? It’s… Offices near Oxford. And they study the ways of animal, being nice to animals, but still being able to use them, you see, on… They gave a sort of, summer banquet at which there was roast chicken, the chickens had had a jolly good life, and, [laughs] it seems to me to be… And they, they propagandise along those lines you see, can tell people that there are ways in which you can eat your bacon, have it, and I think that’s very laudable. You can see how it suits my general slant. Yah.

[24:26] And did you discuss the sorts of things that it was important, you know, important to use animals for, and things that you felt it wasn’t right to use animals for, in terms of experimentation?

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Well, yes, I, I am one of many who, having looked a bit at the experimentation thing, four-fifths of it isn’t needed anyway, it’s just being done because it follows from some other inquiry that’s been made. But I’ve never taken a drastic general line about, about that. I don’t think one can. I mean it, it’s much more a matter of scientists being so used to using mice or whatever that it seems the next step, you know. Well I think various organisations have opposed that since, and it is getting to be a little less automatic. I’m trying to remember the name of one which I… You know, I subscribe to these things and then -. [laughs] And their magazines come round, but they seem… Yah. One gets the impression of waves, waves coming and going back, and, [laughs] you know, only, gradually there is an advance that… Yes. I mean I, that’s one bit of, as it were, solid work that I did, was, I… Because I consider going to committees to be solid work, [laughs] I don’t enjoy it very much. But I learnt a lot about the sort of support that there is, and, and what can be done. And, I mean, it’s, it gets to be possible to say something that you couldn’t have said three years earlier, I think. And that’s how, how progress progresses actually. Yah.

[26:35] Thank you. I wonder, what was Geoff’s view of your books, Evolution as a Religion, Science as Salvation?

He never seemed to pay very much attention, but he had a look at them, and said, ‘Yes, that’s all right.’ I mean, he would pick up something to discuss from time to time. But I mean, we shared an awful lot of our ideas already you see, it wasn’t, there wasn’t anything startling about it usually. But his, his central interest was more in logic, or in the sort of metaphysics that, that’s about what souls are, you know. Yes, he, he’s the source of a remark which I’ve quoted from time to time, how one’ s reflections are often like a committee, when people are arguing. But unfortunately, very often the wrong person speaks up, you see. And I think that’s, that’s quite a profound remark, you know. I mean, this is… Yes, my general bias to unification is of course founded on my believing that we are very conflicted in the first place. It’s… Or, perhaps uniform human condition, that people have all sorts of separate, partially hostile points of view inside them. [pause] Yes, I’m sorry, I, I find it really unbearable that they think that this is a discovery that might be made. That intelligence is useless and there’s no free will. What do they mean? They don’t Mary Midgley Page 83 C1672/05 Track 8 explain what they mean. Things would be different. What do they mean? Really, if determinism were all true. But they don’t explain determinism, you know.

Will you write to them about…?

What?

Will you write to them about…?

I don’t know. I, I am a little bit inclined to, because it seems to me it’s this whole supplement that’s crazy, which is unusual. [pause] But I, sometimes I write and sometimes I don’t.

Do you read it every, do you read every issue?

I read every issue pretty much, yes, and there’s always a funny bit at the back which I will start from. And it’s, you know, I, I like to know what’s going on about… [pause] What is that body that they discovered lately and, it was terribly important that it got discovered. And… They weren’t sure we whether they had discovered it or not, and finally they decided that they had. What was that thing?

MARTIN: The Higgs boson.

That’s right. Yes.

MARTIN: Yah.

Yes, yes. Yes. I like to know what’s happening in that sort of area. Yes yes. Yah.

[30:29] What else do you read regularly? We know the Guardian.

I now have the Guardian once a week, because you get too much paper now if you have any more. But I read, I read the… Well, several bits of it. I’ve just started to Mary Midgley Page 84 C1672/05 Track 8 hear Radio 4, which people rightly tell me is good, but I, there’s something wrong with my radio, I can’t hear it terribly well. I might get you to look at it Mart.

MARTIN: [inaud].

My radio. It is… I can’t hear Radio 4, and I think it’s not partly me; I think it’s partly the machine.

MARTIN: I will have a stern word with it.

If you could. Because I find when other people do that with my contraptions, they get…

MARTIN: Behave. Yes.

Yes. [laughs] Right.

You’re saying you’ve just recently started to listen to Radio 4?

Yes, I just hadn’t noticed Radio 4 before. I had been, largely on Radio 3, because I like the music, but Radio 3, there’s a lot of people chatting now, and I don’t want it. I see, can hear that Radio 4 has good stuff on it. But I, [laughs] I can’t actually hear it.

[31:47] What have you watched on television in the area of popular science at any point in your life?

Well, David Attenborough and company. Any sort of wildlife film I like to watch. And I think the standard of wildlife films has gone up and up, and he’s really done a splendid job there. Otherwise, it’s chancy what I watch. I tend to watch what happens at eight o’clock, because that’s when I’ve had supper, and… And I do find some very interesting things, largely on, on Radio 4, yes.

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I wonder whether you detect any of the scientism and reductionism in treatments of science on TV, to the extent that you’ve seen them.

Yes. Oh yes, TV is very primitive, yes, very seldom does it get past Dawkins. And it is time it got past Dawkins.

[32:56] Have you seen anything of the programmes presented by Brian Cox?

Yes. Now I quite like Brian Cox. I can see some people feel he’s too bouncy. But I think, I mean a bit of bounciness with scientists, I, is all right. The trouble is his, the occasional remarks, which he says science is, as it were, the answer to everything. I don’t think anyone’s ever told him that this isn’t necessarily so. So…. Particularly as he is young and attractive, he’s liable to get spoilt. But I don’t see evidence particularly of that now; so far, he usually tells you about some particular place and particular things, and as far as I can see, he tells the truth. So, he’s all right, he’s a great improvement on some but I, I don’t trust him very far round the corner. [laughs]

Who is he an improvement on, who is he a great improvement on?

Well Dawkins. [laughter] And, yes, I mean, there have been, I can’t remember who they are now, or were, scientists who were called upon when the BBC needed to call on a scientist, not particularly good. I mean, obviously, this, it depends very much on people saying some things which I now think are important truths, or saying the opposite. [laughs] Naturally to be expected. [pause] Yes, I mean it’s, TV, TV is really not very good about that, I think, they don’t do very much about science, and what they do do tends to be awfully out of date.

When you say a great improvement on Richard Dawkins, are you thinking of particular appearances of his on TV, when you say so?

Well, I am thinking of the persona that he brings on TV, which is a very pretentious one. I mean he does take it that he knows everything about, about science so to speak, he’s in a position to talk about science, and to use it to disprove Christianity. And I Mary Midgley Page 86 C1672/05 Track 8 think that’s a very silly… [laughs] He doesn’t know much about Christianity, plainly, at all. But, he, he’s excessively tribal, and you do… And I think TV people are easily tempted by someone who’s a bit tribal and makes these feuds, and encourages the feuds, and I think… I’m sorry, I’ve got this trouble about names, and I have explained to you that it’s a medical reaction actually. But I don’t, I can’t remember a lot of people, but I mean, obviously if I say Dawkins, everyone knows what I mean, and he isn’t doing himself a lot of good by it I think, people are beginning to denounce him, aren’t they.

[36:31] Some of the… I’ll just ask one more question and then we’ll have another break, shall we? Some of the arguments that I’ve been reading in Evolution as a Religion and Are You An Illusion? Remind me of the arguments made by others in the science-religion field when they are talking about complementarity, and the way that sort of empirical science might be one layer, but then you can, you have other layers of meaning.

Yah.

And, they are, they don’t necessarily fit, but they’re all necessary for a sort of whole argument.

Yes.

To what extent have you followed the work of those people? And there’s one who seems to lead it who’s called Donald MacKay, who was a scientist and…

Yes, he’s good, isn’t he. Yes yes. Yes, I have, indeed, followed this, and, my impression is that over the years a bit more sense has got into it than used to be, that people are getting better at not minding saying that in a sense it is, and in a sense something else is, you know. A notorious example is self-knowledge and consciousness. I mean, these people who, like Crick, who said that consciousness is a, a…

MARTIN: An illusion. Mary Midgley Page 87 C1672/05 Track 8

It’s an illusion, that’s right. And all there really is, is brain cells. I mean this is, again, just gratuitously bad philosophy, and, and… But it’s, it’s from this sense that there has got to be one truth, you know. Which in a way is a respectable sense, but you do have to take a lot of trouble to make sure what you mean by it, and people don’t particularly. I mean as I say, the last chapters and so on, you haven’t turned on your critical judgement at that point at all. It’s remaining in the machine. [laughs]

When did you first encounter Donald MacKay, his writings?

It takes me now to my Oxford days. I think he used to come and talk to various bodies that I went to. And again, I’m having trouble remembering. But I certainly associate him with, with ability to bring things together within a larger whole, which people are otherwise feeling are alternatives. I mean, you probably do remember the detail, the actual controversies he was engaged in, and I don’t now. But yes, and I have him down in my mind as a jolly good idea, yah.

Would you… I hadn’t imagined that you would have, but did you ever go to Christian Union meetings at Oxford?

No. I rather avoided Oxford Christianity. There was a, a sort of, a movement going on, was it Christian Union? I don’t know. There were people wandering round Somerville with a large grin, registering delight in the Lord, and they sometimes wanted to talk to you about it. And I think I said to them… Yes, an occasion when I was in the middle of my final exams, and had gone to bed early before the logic exam, and this person, Stella Aldwinckle, was she in the movement that you…? Stella Aldwinckle?

Possibly.

She had a lot to do with running the talks that C S Lewis gave, and I’m in favour of C S Lewis. But anyway, she came knocking on my door at half-past ten at night, and I got rid of her. Yes, I… There were things called OICCU and 'OACU' at Oxford Mary Midgley Page 88 C1672/05 Track 8

University, Christian Union, and so on, and I avoided them, I really didn’t want them. Which is no doubt rather unconstructive of me.

Were there, as far as you remember, any other talks organised on science-religion, outside of the Christian Union movement?

Well, I think the matter came up when general philosophical things were being discussed. [pause] But I don’t think there was a body that was seriously trying to get these things together. The… [pause] I’ve lost the name of it again, the, the conferences that I used to go to.

Oh, Science and Religion Forum?

Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes they were very much engaged with the difficulties arising from, from having these things in conflict, and, I think what I didn’t want about the OICCU and 'OACU' people was that they are apparently not worried about conflict you see, and I thought the conflict was pretty important.

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[Track 9]

Could you tell me about the lives of your children as adults?

They absorbed an interest in computers from my husband, who kept on about them all the time. But, they found that this was a way that people would pay them to keep them alive. [laughs] So two of them have drifted into that. And, the other one, David, is a philosopher, and has plotted it out… He has something in Leeds, which is about… Schumacher North, that’s right, I knew I would get it somehow. Yah. Schumacher College is in the south-west, but it’s, there they operate as a branch of it, yah, enlightening Leeds.

MARTIN: And still are doing.

Mm. Yah. [pause] But none of them is a successful accountant.

MARTIN: No. No, we have not made millions. We’ve neglected to do that.

They’ve done different things at different times.

What overlap is there between David’s work in philosophy and your own?

Well, David is actually interested in very big metaphysical questions about life and human destiny and so on. So, what he is trying to do is a bit of what he has always believed should be done, [laughs] and it’s still part of, of what I’m trying to do, which is bringing everything together, [inaud], yah. But he tends to do it on a large scale, and then not finish it, you know, that’s how people are. [pause]

In… You were interviewed for something called The Believer magazine in about 2008, and the journalist who writes up the interview says that, at the time she came round, you were working on a pamphlet for teachers in British schools to help them to explain the evolution versus creationism debate. I just wondered how that came about.

Sounds plausible, but I don’t remember. [laughs]

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You don’t remember doing so? OK.

No. I’ve done an awful lot of that sort of thing.

Of, of writing specifically for teachers?

Yes, I suppose, sort of, writing for occasions when people needed something explaining. I’m one of the few people who specialised in [making things] intelligible.

[03:24] Mm. And could you tell me about some of the, about the dedication and some of the acknowledgements in Are You An Illusion? The dedication is ‘For Heather’. I wondered…

Heather is a friend in Durham who is exceptionally benevolent and, [laughs] has done an awful lot of-

MARTIN: All-round good thing.

She’s also an intelligent woman. Yah. Yes, I mean, by that time I had dedicated to most of my nearest and dearest, but Heather had turned up more recently, so I, I think it was suitable, don’t you? Mm. Though one doesn’t have to have a justification for these things. [laughs]

And then, the acknowledgements. You’ve got Iain McGilchrist, Stephen Rose, Andrew Brown, Ian Ground and Willie Charlton. Could you tell me about some of those relationships?

Well, McGilchrist is the fellow who goes in for the two halves of the brain. You probably know him. What were the others?

Steven Rose.

Steven Rose, I think has done a very good job of abolishing Dawkins’s… and resisting Dawkins in many ways. And he has a very good view of what science is and what it does. And, who else? Mary Midgley Page 91 C1672/05 Track 8

Andrew Brown?

Andrew Brown, well I’ve known for a long time, and I’m trying to remember how it started. He was a religious correspondent for the Guardian for a time. He doesn’t exactly believe in religion, but he’s very interested in it. You will see articles by him about church politics and so forth. He knows a lot about how the church is run, and which I don’t. But he’s also, he’s written a book, was it Darwin’s Worms? That’s right, yes. Yah. So we share a lot of interest. Yah. He turns up from time to time.

How did you meet him? I mean how…

Mm?

How did you meet him, how does…?

Well you keep asking me this. I think in the columns in the Guardian, more or less. But, the kind of thing that I simply don’t remember is, people who are talking on the same platform. But I mean he’s the sort of person who I would, would meet; his interests overlap very much with mine. So it isn’t a problem. I mean, if you started to ask about Dawkins, I shouldn’t know when. [laughs]

[06:25] And Steven Rose. Is he someone who merely commented on the draft of your book, or is he someone who you’ve talked to over a number of years?

Oh, I’ve talked to him a great deal. He’s always been an obvious person in this intelligent resistance to sociobiology really. Yah. Yes, he is particularly keen on for political reasons because, sociobiology was being used by racists, and he was always inclined to do something about racism. But apart from that, his interests overlap with mine.

Another one was Ian Ground.

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Oh well, he’s a philosopher in Newcastle, who I don’t think people have yet heard of but I dare say they will. He’s chiefly an aesthetician, but, he’s just someone I, I argue with as it were.

MARTIN: [laughs] He was a student.

Mm?

MARTIN: He was a student, as…

Mm. Mm. I argue with him, when I can hear him, which isn’t always. [Martin laughs] He mutters. How are you situated?

MARTIN: I’m done really. I’m done.

[07:43] The last time you said that, you thought that the Christian Church recently in Britain seems to have picked itself up, because there are more sensible people talking about it. What did you mean?

Well, I suppose I mean, particularly the fellow who comes in the Saturday Guardian. [pause]

Ah, yes, Giles Fraser.

Yah.

Yes.

Who by the way was one of our students here. And I, I… It’s just a rough impression from what one picks up and sees, that, a lot of Christians are trying to think how, how to connect their views with the views that other people have, rather than saying, we’re right and you’re wrong, you know. I think there’s been a very considerable change in that direction, which is a good thing.

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[08:43] To what extent do you think that science is, is particularly or peculiarly male? Quite apart from the fact that, you know, most…

Well, it depends on the cultural situation at the time, and what people attach to it. I mean, I think this idea is connected with materialism, with the thought that what there really is, is machines, you know, and, men naturally do machines. But with the educational system being what it is naturally, all these learned things went on being done by men, except when women managed to get in and do a bit. And that hasn’t, that seems to have worked moderately well about botany, biology, that there’s quite a lot of women in that, to the extent that people say, ‘I’m not going to do biology because women do it,’ you know, that sort of thing. [pause] But the other snag obviously is rather simply, lifestyle and, particularly having children, isn’t it. I mean, it’s really not sense to expect someone to work at a top level, in a difficult profession, and also be looking after their children. I know a lot of people will undertake to do this, but it doesn’t work. Not really. So, I mean there’s plenty to keep things as they are. [laughs] Where’s my bit of Kleenex?

[10:35] And could you say something… I asked you a question off the recording about your levels of interest in French philosophy.

I told you, I don’t read these people. I have not read Derrida or Foucault. You know, one seems to come across a lot of quotes, naturally, like everybody does, but I, I’m not on the whole impressed. And the idea that this is, as it were, the only, the only alternative to [inaud] Anglo-American word shopping, seems to me just a mistake. But, no no, it’s one of these tribal, tribal battles that goes on.

And in Are You An Illusion?, you worry that the drastic reductive stories of science are very convincing for the public.

Well, I suppose they are, because, everybody likes to be certain, and, on the whole of course we, we like things to be simple. But the notion that people pick up at any one time is, whatever the people selling it are able to sell, isn’t it. I mean this stuff isn’t even simple, you see. [laughs] They get sense of a grandeur, don’t they? I, I think I must stop. Mary Midgley Page 94 C1672/05 Track 8

[End of Track 9]

[End of Interview]