The Myths We Live By
Patti Whaley reviews 'The Myths We Live By', by Mary Midgley. Routledge. 2003. 192 pages. £10.99. ISBN 0415340772
The easy way to read Midgley is to enjoy how well she dissects what she is against. In The Myths We Live By, she applies her philosophical scalpel to three prevailing myths which, in her view, are dangerously overgrown: the social-contract myth, the progress myth, and the myth of omnicompetent science. In 27 short chapters, originally published as lectures or articles and addressing anything from the mind-body problem to the re-introduction of wolves in upper New York State, she takes us to task for applying myths in contexts where they dont belong. Myths, in Midgleys use of the term, are not cosmological stories but underlying constructs by which we organise our perception of the world; they are the assumptions and symbols that shape our thought, without necessarily being visible to those doing the thinking.
Midgley is at her best when arguing against the kind of science that asserts that thinking is reducible to particle physics, that culture is reducible to memes, and that the mind-body problem can be solved by dismissing the mind as an illusion. Such approaches ignore what is empirically obvious: the fact that phenomena can be reduced to a lowest level doesnt mean that other levels are invalidated or illusory. The Brahms fourth symphony, chocolate cake, and the sentence George was allowed home from prison at last on Sunday are all underpinned by particle physics, but are not thereby explained. Her style is lucid, forthright, and punctuated by satisfying one-liners. Comparing current attempts to apply particle physics to culture with Aristotles attempt to extend human purposes to inanimate objects, she dismisses both: stones do not have purposes, but neither do cultures have particles.
It is not only science that comes in for Midgleys critique; big moral ideas also have their limits. Humanists are taken to task for believing that once Christian structures are cleared away, life in general will be quite all right. Rights advocates are warned that the use of rights-language in inappropriate contexts simply discredits the rights project as too unrealistic to be taken seriously. Psychologists who have become so secularized that they refuse to enquire seriously into the nature of religious experience cannot hope to have a coherent, comprehensive theory of psychology.
Where Midgley is frustrating is that she is continually pointing us away from simplistic, partial, one-size-fits-all analyses towards a more holistic, balanced, pluralistic view but she rarely spells out what that view would be. I felt the same frustration when reading her earlier book Wickedness; she is lucid and convincing in her arguments about why wickedness cannot be explained away as just a God-problem, or just aggression, or just determinism, or just a death-wish; but she never gets around to explaining what it is. If you want answers, she doesnt deliver.