A wise man once counseled me that whenever I wrote, spoke or teach, to always stick to what I know. For once someone drifts outside his or her own area of expertise, they are likely to start making fundamental mistakes.
Sage and obvious advice, but nonetheless advice that is often not followed by experts in one field who are then thought to be an expert on everything. One of the most misquoted and misattributed people in history may well be Albert Einstein. For more than a century his name has become synonymous with genius, so some have assumed that he would have wise things to say about everything from God to politics.
This book, although a few years old, deserves to be resurrected and remembered as one of the best examples of a professional philosopher taking on some of the worst excesses of "Popular science." If this book were to come out in a new edition I am sure that Mary would have a great deal of fun with all those people who claim that quantum mechanics is the explanation for everything from how to run a business to the behavior of stock markets. Sadly it is not, and some of the authors of such books have taken "surprising" short cuts.
Mary Midgley is known to be a combative philosopher and here she takes on those scientists who breezily tell us that their equations will help us to "Know the Mind of God." To which we have to pose the Emperor's New Cloth's question: "Who and when was it decided that meaning, purpose, good and evil, are all subject to the laws of the material universe? And secondly that they are to be found in a series of equations that will almost certainly be re-written in the future?"
The answer to the question, "How and when did this happen?" can probably be traced back to the 1930s, when a number of influential scientists at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge embraced an extreme Marxist and Leninist position and advocated a mechanistic and deterministic science that would be able to provide the answers to absolutely everything. In effect they firmly believed in the idea of a scientific priesthood that would hold all the keys to the kingdom of truth. There are still many professional scientists who believe to this day that science as it is now will be able to provide all the answers to "Life, the universe and everything." And by using their positions of authority to promote the idea in popular books, they try to persuade us that current scientific models can answer any question and anything that cannot be explained - including data on parapsychology and unorthodox healing - is therefore "Woo."
Someone once said to me, "Science works, it has given us telephones, computers and airplanes." That is the crux of the problem, and it is a problem: it mixes up science and technology, and allows "scientism" to flourish - the notion that science has ultimate authority over all other interpretations of life and over all other fields of inquiry. And ultimately scientism would have us believe in a universe without value, meaning or purpose. Throughout the essays in this book, Midgley consistently points out that scientism has created a dangerous myth about how the universe operates, and that myth has informed everything from the way in which we treat the environment to the way in which we practice medicine.
Midgley writes that we must continue to develop new ways of thinking, and she points out that the development of ideas of ecology, ecosystems and Gaia are all examples of a welcome move away from the competitive nature of scientism to a more cooperative relationship with each other and with other life forms. In other words we have to understand that we have been mislead into believing a seriously flawed myth, and if we want to achieve lasting change in the world, we need to change those myths. Happily that process is already underway.
Highly recommended.
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of
Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
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Ms. Louise Knight
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 21, 2023
