Mary Midgley & The Solitary Self

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Among moral philosophers Mary Midgley has a razor-sharp mind, and when she speaks I listen. Her new book is The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. As the title suggests, in the book she takes up her long-standing disagreement with Richard Dawkins and his The Selfish Gene, an extremely important book which nonetheless appeals to a rather limited understanding of Darwin, according to Midgley. In the video below, she points out that Dawkins' title is anthropomorphic and therefore off the mark.

In the video she discusses the linkage between a rather shallow but prevalent societal view of individualism and Darwin's concerns about evolution and human morality. I will add that in the USA, both the politics of economics and politics in general are based on a flawed, Spencerian understanding of human nature. What do I mean? In The Descent of Man, Darwin points out that humans are aware of their life as a whole and the effect of their actions, good or bad, upon the entire culture, unlike other animals. This is Darwin's understanding of human nature and it does not imply modern market economics ideology in which Ayn Rand's Nietzschean and wealthy superheroes save the masses from themselves. (19th Century America "unfortunates" have become "losers" in the 21st, so to distinguish them from the only other possibility, "winners.")

The Selfish Gene, Midgley argues, represents an extreme neo-Darwinism. She allows that Dawkins didn't invent this view, but piggy-backed upon a Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest myth prevalent in society since the Nineteenth Century. (These are not her words, but I am sure she would concur.) The success of Dawkins' book stems from its resonance with  post-industrial myth.

She challenges a reduction of human motivation to self-interest. Human psychology is not so neat, she says. Instead, reductionist individualism can be traced to the Eighteenth Century and, before that, Thomas Hobbes' contribution to Enlightenment thought. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged represents a heroic independence that is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. Darwin called it right. As natural selection reveals over and over, "fittest" does not mean "strongest," but an ability to adapt, often through "cooperation" with other organisms. We humans evolved to cooperate, to interact constantly with one another and as a dependent and tiny part of complex and huge ecosystems. Too bad that a more enlightened understanding of human nature has not found its way into economics and politics.Tweet

Flat Earthers Unite: Politically Correct Text Disclaimers

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I recently joined the Flat Earth Society because after thinking about the implications of the Old Testament, and after serious and careful consideration I concluded that Columbus was wrong. He did not sail far enough. Had he sailed past China he would have fallen off the edge of the world. He would have fallen into Hell. Satan would have sentenced him to its lower depths to burn in fierce-red flames for wanting to know too much.

The same goes for Darwin, Newton, and Copernicus. They wanted to know too much.

As for me, I'm content to bask in the ignorance God has bestowed on me. Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Fruit of Knowledge and look at the legacy they left us.

In the public weal I am proposing some stickers I found for public school textbooks. I sincerely offer them in the best interests of future generations. Our children are threatened by an atheistic, socialist government that wants them to know too much. The stickers are warnings to be placed inside the front covers of biology, physics, and astronomy textbooks.

Because the government and the ACLU will take school boards to court, the stickers can only be advisory and are politically correct. I am confident that some parts of Texas will implement them immediately. Here they are:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living organisms. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

This textbook asserts that gravity exists. Gravity is a force that cannot be directly seen. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

This textbook explains heliocentrism, the theory that the Earth orbits around a centrally located sun. By definition, then, the theory also holds that Earth is not the center of the universe. Students should be encouraged to fully consider the evidence for, and the evidence against, this theory.