The Myths We Live by

by Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Mythology, History, Psychology, Anthropology

192 pages, ebook

First published May 15, 2003

About the author

Mary Beatrice Midgley (née Scrutton; 13 September 1919 – 10 October 2018[1]) was a British philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man (1978), when she was in her fifties. She has since written over 15 other books, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She has been awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.

Midgley strongly opposed reductionism and scientism, and any attempts to make science a substitute for the humanities—a role for which it is, she argued, wholly inadequate. She wrote extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from animals. A number of her books and articles discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins. She also wrote in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis. The Guardian described her as a fiercely combative philosopher and the UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension.'"

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

The book reminded me of a spiral arm galaxy. Centred on a dense spherical mass, its arms curve outwards round to all kinds of subjects, remote, yet related to the central issues. Which I will try to try crudely simplify and summarise ( which the author would see as problematic)as the point at which science becomes sciency, either because it is haunted by the ghosts of past ideologies (her example might be Feminism, which she observes has to come about because mysteriously when at the close of the Enlightenment people are talking about Liberté, égalité, fraternité women are apparently excluded from these ‘universal’ human ideals, Midgley says ah-ha this shows the lasting influence of the unarticulated idea of virism and along side it that an inferior social position is still required of women ”in order to make it possible for the men to become totally free, equal, autonomous, intellectual, and creative” (p.140)), or becomes a metaphysical sketch of how reality is supposed to work (p.170), or inappropriately transfers a scientific theory into an alien context - her example here would be Social Darwinism, but another could be the story that one day Mrs Thatcher sat down besides Richard Dawkins at a college dinner and he used his selfish Gene theory to teach her that there is no such thing as society (this may be a myth).

In part rather as A short History of Myth conflated myth and religion in places here I felt myth was used as a synonym for metaphor, but Midgley goes further than Armstrong by showing how behind metaphors like the brain is a computer made of meat, or the body is a machine there is a hidden mythology, sometimes of defunct ideas like the Cartesian brain/body divide, or simply unacknowledged assumptions about the superiority of the mind and dismissal of the physical.

Here and there I wondered if the quotations she cites fr extreme and foolish sounding positions that she cites from Richard Dawkins, Colin Blackmore, and Daniel Dennett were really representative of their ideas, presumably they are all big and ugly enough to have responded if they thought that they had been dealt with unfairly.

I was interested by her argument that the claims made of science go too far, for her this is typified by Rudolf Carnap writing When we say that Scientific knowledge is unlimited, we mean that there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science, in the same vein she cites Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud among others, a good number of the people that she accuses of going to far in this way were German speakers and I guess they originally said or wrote or had in mind Wissenschaft rather than science, the two are good enough translations for each other, but Wissenschaft is a much wider concept than science, it is any learned endeavour, the study of folklore, or ethics, even economics, can be Wissenschaften but would not be in English scientific. Carnap’s claim is extreme in English, but fairly mild and reasonable in German, but mysteriously the broader sense of the German word seems to have become coupled with the rather narrower English for some writers. Midgley points out that this has serious consequences as it leads to Science becoming a substitute for religion, followed by simplistic theories applied from the sciences to social problems and a preference towards simplicity on the model of Newtonian Physics.

This is linked for her with the simplistic technical solutions offered for complex social problems, she looks at fertility treatments and liver transplants, the former she holds are mostly required because more couples are trying to have children later in life, in the case of the latter the demand she says is driven by damage caused by alcohol consumption. The technical fixes however, and debates over them, take us further away from the social causes of these problems ensuring that we don’t think about them and so perpetuate them in our societies.

As befits a spiral arm galaxy, the text wanders, latterly touching on animal rights and the environment before abruptly ending with no real sense of a conclusion. Throughout is is a deeply interesting voyage of exploration, committing to having multiple viewpoints rather than restricting ourselves to a single methodology and aware of the mythological structures often unobserved in the background of our thinking.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second Midgley books I’ve read – and I would really recommend this one too. Not least because it makes very clear the problems with ‘memes’ and that is a very important thing to be made clear. I want to talk about the problem of ‘science’ and how we have somehow come to the view that a very particular kind of rational thinking is the criterion for all true knowledge, and even of all worthwhile knowledge. That is a very terrifying idea.

This is a book that stresses that much of what we take to be transparent truths are actually intimately bound up with the myths we feel most comfortable with. In the main this is related to the idea that physics is the purest of the sciences and it is really up to all other kinds of knowledge to somehow find ways to imitate that. This is amusing, as the kind of physics that people want the social sciences to imitate certainly isn’t the kind of physics that modern physics has become. I don’t even mean the ‘Buddhist version’ of modern physics that gets a run in books from time to time – but rather even straight modern physics, the kind that has remarkably humble desires – you know, like the ‘theory of everything’. This theory of everything is really just a theory might one day overcome the intractable contradictions that exist between quantum and relativistic physics. I have to say that if that is ‘everything’ to you, you really do need to get out more.

Much of the problem here has to do with Descartes and his mind body dualism. In fact, the last bits of this book is really an extended contemplation on humanity and its place in relation to animals as an urgent task facing us – and mostly in the sense of it being something we would do well to come up with better myths about. That is, the fact that it is becoming ever clearer that we need to fundamentally rethink the ‘there is us and then there is everything else’ split that we have held between animals and ourselves for, well, forever. And that is because this is no longer a myth (a way of understanding the world) that is serving us particularly well. As we witness the sixth great extinction event from an up-close and personal vantage point (and as its major cause), pretending we are not really like ‘them’, where ‘them’ is all the rest of the animal kingdom, isn’t really going to cut it for much longer.

And it isn’t really just a matter of stripping naked and singing Kumbaya, although, even that possibly worth a try – my place, 7:30. Rather it is about trying to understand the world in all of its complexities, rather than purely and eternally in reductionist terms that, by definition, seek to simplify. Whether or not you agree with Dawkins that genes are selfish and the main replicators in biological evolution (and many biologists have always disagreed with Dawkins on that), it certainly isn’t the case that we need a comparable ‘replicator’ if we are to understand our cultures. The memes myth is a problem for me for much the same reason that the genes myth is. For things to really make sense they have to be understood in context – which, if you asked me, could be pretty well said to be the main point of Darwinian evolution as ‘natural selection’. To then propose selfish genes that are somehow out to take over the world with identical versions of themselves seems to miss the point of the contextual nature of biological truth. And if culture (as well as biology) is about relationships in constant flux, rather than atomised memes seeking eternal identity, then the ‘memes’ are not just the wrong end of the telescope, it is actually hard to see what purpose they serve at all. Well, other than the obvious one – that of providing people that like their knowledge to come in self-same patterns all the way through to get their little OCD kicks.

Like I said, I enjoyed this book – just as I also enjoyed her other one on science and poetry. Hard to imagine anyone who really liked poetry thinking meme theory has any value other than a pretty simplistic metaphor, but perhaps that is just being nasty.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Writers of the world: if you're going to write about how all of science is wrong, have the decency to understand at least one of the specific topics you intend to write about.

*Every fucking sentence* in this book is wrong in some way.
She whines about memetics (which apparently says ideas are like alien insects that can be exterminated with the right pesticide), objectivity (apparently the fact that there are degrees of objectivity means that it's an incoherent concept), social contracts (incompatible with fundamental human rights, in her mind), the "omnicompetence" of science (being the idea that science can answer any question; she doesn't even make a case against this, but just repeats the definition a few times while waving her arms wildly (though she does reinvent NOMA yet again while doing so)), parsimony (I *still* don't know what she thinks that word means), reductionism (her understanding of which is unplagued by such concepts as emergent complexity, and of course reductionists never see the value of high-level abstraction), behaviourism (which apparently says mind doesn't do anything), sociobiology (which can't discuss altruism because it's not supposed to deal with motives), genes influencing behaviour (without even having the decency of building a proper straw man out of genetic determinism), "scientific monoculture" (she doesn't explicitly say "science is just one way of knowing", but her arguments, such as they are, do boil down to it), memes again (even more confused than the first time; did you know that in spite of what Dawkins actually said, Dawkins defined memes as static entities?), reductionism again, free market economics (it's social Darwinism, dontchaknow), the explanatory power of selection (apparently the fact that wrong-headed rules-lawyering is possible undermines the whole concept), and a host of other misunderstood topics (reductionism and memetics among them) too tedious to enumerate.
Her examples of science "done right" are far in between, but equally sad: the Gaia of Margulis and Sagan, and Paul Davies' dipshitted blather on consciousness and religion.

Considering how obsessed this woman is with Dawkins, she seems to have read very little of his work. If not for some intensely dishonest quotemines sprinkled throughout the book (though Dawkins is far from her only victim in that regard), I'd say all of her information comes from glancing at a blurb on the back cover of The Selfish Gene.
And considering that this book is supposed to be anti-establishment wank, it seems to rely on appeals to authority a bit too much. For instance, did you know Darwin said in the sixth edition of Origin that he didn't think natural selection was the only driving force behind evolution? Mary Midgley does! Never mind that Darwin didn't even know about genes and so was understandably confused about genetic drift, clearly Dawkins and Dennett are so wrong even people a century-and-a-half ago disagree with them!

It's not just the things she explicitly tackles that she doesn't have a clue about, though; her digressions and off-the-cuff remarks indicate that she's ignorant about topics ranging from basic history all the way to basic physics. It should be obvious by now that she's also incapable of elementary-school-level reading comprehension, though apparently she can type (but not necessarily spell; she mixes British and American spellings (though to be fair, so do I)), if not actually construct a coherent argument. I really don't know why any publisher would print her drivel, or why anyone with a high school education would read it and come away liking it, as (judging from the cover) at least six people seem to have done. I can see how you could fall for the quotemining if you aren't actually familiar at all with any of the work she discusses, but I find it hard to believe anyone unfamiliar with all of it (which would require not just homeschooling, but actually living under a rock) would even pick up a book by a self-proclaimed "philosopher of science".

The Myths We Live By is easily the worst book I have ever read. It beats out even Ayn Rand. Compared to this, God Explained in a Taxi Ride was a literary masterpiece and C.S. Lewis was a deep thinker. It now has the dubious honour of being the third book I own that I refuse to keep on my shelves. It's an endless parade of straw men and painful (and hopefully deliberate) misinterpretation. Dawkins himself has said that of Midgley that she "raises the art of misunderstanding to dizzy heights", but that is an incredible understatement.

tl;dr: Mary Midgley doesn't know shit about anything she writes about and is a profoundly unpleasant person. I find it hard to believe anyone could genuinely be that dense, so I would say she's senile or otherwise feebleminded, insane or driven to deliberate misunderstanding (perhaps by lust for publicity or hatred of Dawkins), or a very elaborate troll.
Since I'm a very generous person when it comes to judging others, I'm going with senile.

I want my €20.15 back.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a satisfyingly brilliant read--an excellent response to the "faith in reason" folks who are spinning myths all the same. The book starts with a roar and ends in a whimper, but it's well thought out and brilliantly argued.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

In general, I am allergic to philosophy. It seems so abstracted from real life as to be meaningless, so caught up in minutiae as to lose track of the things we care about. But philosophical writing did play a role in my intellectual development. Reading Mary Mdigley’s “Science as Salvation” (along with Richard Tarnas’ grant “The passion of the Western Mind”) during one summer in college provoked one of my semi-regular existential crises, and also helped push me out of the sciences and back into the humanities.

This content of “The Myths We Live by” is very similar to that of “Science as Salvation.” In readable, jargon-free prose Midgley takes on her old bête noirs, reductionist science, memes, social Darwinism, and imperialist scientists who want to explain culture mechanistically. The arguments are detailed and persuasive, attacking the words used by her intellectual foes against them. They are not particularly fresh, though, and the attacks on memes particularly seem a bit dated: there are still scientists and philosophers musing about the technical meaning of memes, the word itself has taken on different connotations in demotic English: memes are now funny pictures and cats eating cheeseburgers. Philosophical objections seem . . . beside the point.

Her aims are very similar in this book--really a collection of papers and talks that she worked to make into a continuous if not comprehensive argument--are similar, too. Midgley is staking out a pragmatic position with a dash of Habermasian discursive rationality. I didn’t note her citing George Herbert Mead or the Chicago School of Symbolic Interactionists, but her philosophy is close to their sociology. It is one of the bases for her objection to memetics.

Culture, she says, does not have fundamental units that are selected for; culture is something that is created by the interactions of humans, arguing, talking and ultimately agreeing upon what counts as important, what counts as real, what counts as significant. She also brings these points of view into debates over biotechnology. In a surprising concession, she argues that we need to take people’s feeling that biotechnology is unnatural seriously. (Claims of something being unnatural more generally work against her broadly liberal agenda.) But just because we take them seriously, we don’t have to completely honor them: we debate the issues, getting into the details and acknowledging the complexity--thus insights, emotions, thoughts, and ideas need to be tested in debate and, ultimately, face compromise because we need to get things done.

But even as Midgley is extolling the virtues of vigorous debate--and her book is an excellent example of what such debate should look like--she questions how we set up the debate. Early on, she discusses the persistence of the myth of the “social contract,” and how that ideal is in tension with other ideals, namely universal human rights and respect for other living things. She wants to expand the social contract so that it is not just a covenant between the governed and government--an excellent idea when it was conceived, but now too confining. She cites one of my favorite naturalists, Donald Griffin, arguing that (contrary to behaviorists) it is quite parsimonious to assume animals have varying degrees of consciousness.

The key message of the book is to take seriously the symbols we use to discuss reality (there’s that symbolic interactionism again). The symbol of the contract is too strict. And reductionist explanations of behavior as if humankind, animals, and the universe were naught but machines objectifies people, turns them into cogs and strips them of their dignity. She prefers other metaphors: maps and ecosystems. The world is constantly changing, she says, and we have to adapt our thought to the changes in the world, the way species adapt to new environments, picking out what is useful, jettisoning that which does not give us powerful ways of thinking about how to live.

There are no fundamental issues, she says, or rather, what is fundamental depends upon the questions on is asking and the tools one brings to bear on the question. Reality is diverse and complex, and so we map it in different ways, asking questions about the physics of a situation or the biology or the humanity. This perspective she opposes to E. O. Wilson’s neo-Comtean attempts to reduce all of culture to biology (and all of biology to physics).

This message--to take seriously are symbols--is what makes the book different from “Science as Salvation” and is foregrounded especially in the first chapters, when she takes on three persistent myths leftover from the Enlightenment that have lost what value they once had: the social contract, the myth of progress, and the omnicompetence of science. The third is especially a bugaboo for her, underwriting her objections to the first two. Science has come to be seen as a panacea to all ills, capable of solving not only only problems in physics but in political economy and sociology and the like.

This science, though, she says, is not really science--it is not working out of some molecular mechanism on the bench in the lab. It is a set of values described as science. In short, it is a myth. But here, again, Midgley takes an interesting turn. She is not using myth in a purely pejorative sense. We have myths, she says--and we need them. “They are the matrix of thought, the background that shapes our mental habits. They decide what we think important and what we ignore. They provide the tools with which we organise the mass of incoming data. When they are bad they can do a great deal of harm by distorting our selection and slanting our thinking. That is why we need to watch them so carefully.”

Such an approach to myths, I think, is extremely useful. The book did not provoke in me any kind of existential crisis, but ti made me think about the world differently. Nothing she says is exactly earth shattering--indeed, a lot of it is basic history and sociology of science (I wonder why Midgley is not more often taught in those departments) but her polished, straightforward prose gave me a better handle on the ideas, a way to hold and use them. It is a model object of her philosophy.

[Jan Höglund · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is based on the view that our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are necessary parts of our thinking.[1] The challenge is that our imaginative visions may mislead us if they are fired up by a particular set of ideals.[2]

Myths are are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols, that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.[3] In political thought they are at the heart of theories of human nature and the social contract; in economics in the pursuit of self interest; and in science the idea of human beings as machines. The machine imagery began to pervade our thought in the 17th century. We still often tend to see ourselves, and the the living world around us, mechanistically.[4]

The way we imagine the world determines what we think important in it, what we select for our attention. That is why we need to become aware of these symbols.[5] Mary Midgley starts by concentrating on myths which have come down to us from the Enlightenment.[6] The machine imagery became entrenched because the 17th century scientists were fascinated by clockwork automata. They hoped to extend this clockwork model to cover the whole of knowledge.[7] The great thinkers of the 17th century were obsessed by the ambition to drill all thought into a single formal system. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, tried to mend the mind/body gap by building abstract systems powered by their models of thought, logic, and mathematics.[8]

The trouble lies in the conviction that only one very simple way of thought is rational.[9] Mary Midgley points out that rationality doesn't require us to have all our knowledge tightly organized on the model of mathematics.[10] We welcome oversimple intellectual systems because they contrast with the practical complexity around us, and we do not criticize them when the particular short-cut that they offer suggest a world view that we like. They express visions that attracts us, and they obscure alternative possibilities.[11]

Mary Midgley emphasizes that conceptual mono-culture cannot work because, in almost all our thought, we are dealing with subject-matters that we need to consider from more than one aspect.[12] She reminds us that we always have a choice about the perspective from which we look, whether it is from the inside, as participants, or from some more distant perspective. And if so, which of many distant perspectives we will choose. We need to combine several perspectives, since they are not really alternatives, but complementary parts of a wider inquiry.[13] The trouble comes when we dogmatically universalize our own generalizations and promote them as laws of nature.[14]

All perception takes in only a fraction of what is given to it, and all thought narrows that fraction still further in trying to make sense of it.[15] The concepts that we need to use for everyday life are often in some ways blurred or ambivalent, because life itself is too complex for simple descriptions. The standards of clarity that we manage to impose in our well-lit scientific workplaces are designed to suit the preselected problems that we take in there with us, not the larger tangles from which those problems were abstracted.[16]

People habitually think that mechanistic explanations are more scientific than ones that use concepts more appropriate to living contexts.[17] Those who use the analogy with machines seem to be claiming that we have a similar understanding of plants and animals. Mary Midgley points out that it's perhaps a rather important difference that we didn't design those plants and animals.[18] She reminds us that obsession with a particular model drives out other necessary ways of thinking.[19] Changing the myth is a way to bring about serious change.[20] It's an elegant and thoughtful little book!

Notes:
[1] Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (Routledge, 2011, first published 2004), p.xii.
[2] Ibid., p.xiii.
[3] Ibid., p.1.
[4] Ibid..
[5] Ibid., p.3.
[6] Ibid., p.7.
[7] Ibid., p.27.
[8] Ibid., p.88.
[9] Ibid., p.31.
[10] Ibid., p.33.
[11] Ibid., p.44.
[12] Ibid., p.68.
[13] Ibid., p.107.
[14] Ibid., p.124.
[15] Ibid., p.40.
[16] Ibid., p.194.
[17] Ibid., p.196.
[18] Ibid., p.163.
[19] Ibid., p.171.
[20] Ibid., p.251.

[Marco · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable read for those interested in how the modern worldview has been influenced by reductionist views that attempt to draw legitimacy from the natural sciences, and how those reductionisms leave us with inadequate tools for facing some of the most pressing matters nowadays, such as environmental issues (and, closer to home, AI).

[Nancy Schober · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't find the writing very accessible. And yes we've swung too far in the direction of reductionism- especially in medicine where the human body is broken down into a series of unrelated parts. But you can't blame science for bad science. And I think Midgley used bad science in some of her examples. (reminds me of the joke of the grain farmer who switched to chickens and didn't know if he should plant them head down or feet down. After the 2nd batch died he calls the university extension to ask their advice. Who say, "send us a sample of your soil.")

We ARE slowly coming to the realization that not everything can be weighed and measured. And I do see it is dawning on some first worlders/westerners the everything is interconnected- mind/body - humanity/earth. Now what this has to do with quantum mechanics...I don't know. I just feel our current theories are a poor fit to describe what observation is showing. But I also I don't think the answers lie outside of reason/logic.

We need to admit that we don't exactly know how the world works and that our current theories are inadequate to fully describe it. We need to not be like the endocrinologist who I encountered personally who acted as though things didn't exist UNTIL science had proved them.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read that isn't so much about how myths have and continue to influence how we should approach life but more about how a focused, over simplified approach to science and thereby life in general has not been and is not beneficial. This reductionist approach has become common not just within the different science disciplines but also in wider society as everything gets reduces down to sound bites, memes, and clickbait. None of this is a good thing as the bigger complex picture gets missed and different views and approaches get lost. Midgley leads this to the overall conclusion that without this recognition that everything is complex and multilayered, we as a species will destroy that complexity, and us along with it. While I don't necessarily agree with all of her points, interpretations, or explanations of some of the scientific aspects, I do agree with her general premise that if we become to narrowly focused and too caught up on the absolutes then we will miss things. As an ecologist I prefer the more holistic approach and often this is the only way to truly see that ripple effect that can arise from one action, be it good, bad, or indifferent.

[Mehrdad · Rating 3 out of 5]

این کتاب به ما دید واقعی تری از چیزی که ما بهش "علم" میگیم میده و یه جور تلنگره برای اینکه بفهمیم هنوز خیلی از رویکردهایی که فکر میکنیم تماما بر پایه شواهد و علمن در واقع بیش ازونی که فکر میکنیم تحت تاثیر تصورات و پیش زمینه های فکری مان. همینطور در خیلی از علوم، در حال حاضر یک علم جامع و شامل نداریم و هر جزء، بخش مشخصی از کل حقایق رو برای ما آشکار میکنه.
فصل های آخر هم به موضوع دیگری در حیطه تقابل انسان با طبیع�� پرداخته که جالب بود برام.

ترجمه کتاب یه مقدار ثقیل و غیرروان بود. حتی اسم کتاب هم خیلی ایراد داره. عنوان اصلی the myth we live by به معنی "باورهای نادرستی که با آن زندگی می‌کنیم "ه که واقعاً ربطی به اسطوره ها نداره!:/

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first read of my Portland book haul, this interesting work talks about the cultural meanings we ascribe to our knowledge. Midgley is a very testy thinker who doesn't like facile sloganeering, so she takes the science boys to task. The final chapters of the book focus on animal rights and are perhaps a bit repetitive. Overall, though, I really enjoyed her essays.

[Egle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! Loads of food for thought about what underpins our every-day beliefs. Midgley's writing is lucid, engaging, and often quite funny.
This is a good overview book of her philosophies, and I definitely need to read her other works to sink my teeth into deeper into the various arguments.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Encontrei este livro na seção de Mitologia do sebo A Degustadora de Livros, de Ribeirão Preto. Contudo, este não é necessariamente um livro sobre mitos e o estudo de histórias que orientam a humanidade desde o princípio dos tempos. Por outro lado, ele estuda os mitos da cinetifização do mundo a partir do Iluminismo, os diversos mitos sociais que a humanidade estabeleceu para ter um domínio e controle da massa. Então, nos vinte e sete ensaios que compõem este livro, sua autora, Mary Midgley, explora como temos vivido em sociedade através de mitos, de inverdades, de ficções, que sustentam nossa organização enquanto uma comunidade e enquanto animais sociais. A autora traz diversos exemplos que confirmam essa sua "hipótese" se baseando bastante na memética, por exemplo, para explicar como determinadas ideias nos contagiam e passam de uma mente a outra, orientando nossas ações e comportamentos. Certamente o livro rendeu pelo menos um ótimo insight para pesquisa.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have found myself coming back to this book many times over the years, but always by way of portions or summaries or external dialgoues about her ideas and her thesis. That it felt due time to finally sit down and read it front to back was an afterthought to the stars finally aligning. This wasn't on my radar to read this month (December, 2025), but it nevertheless found its way into the line up.

Here Midgley has an aim or a target. We might call it science, but its more so a particular formulation of science into a worldview. But I think her target reaches even further, bringing in the whole enlightenment enterprise as part of a necessary critique. She even gives it an embodied form- the new atheists. Whom she cites repeatedly within the context of the larger problem. Of course its always dangerous to reduce any work to a singular idea or concept, but given her interests I do think its fair. These thinkers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) all have their own voices but are birthed in the same soil and breathe the same air. If someone percieves there to be a problem (an observation I am in agreement with), it is those core Enlightenment ideals that provides the way into naming it. That these particular examples of "representative voices" are evoked is simply because, as she intuits, we are still living in their shadows. I don't think its unfair to call out their well established presuppositions as having certain implications when it comes to our understanding of knowledge and science and truth and myth, and in her most upfront and biting critique, the phrase that still stands out for me is that if what they presuppose is true, "it would not (be) a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life." This feels apt I think to where many of us find ourselves on what is arguably the other side of our needed efforts to deconstruct the world the new atheists handed us.  

As Midgley points out, such a view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works as an experiential act. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us, roots knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.

We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is in fact a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy. And for good reason. And part of what Midgley is arguing is that even someone like Dawkin's knows this to be true. It's why his efforts to root knowledge in science inevitably keep being betrayed by the invading force of his value systems. And yet his, and much of the reasoning tthat we find birthed from this same soil and breathing this same air, is built on a foundaiton that has certain implications that must hold it to account if it indeed wants to be rational.

The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as, in Midgley's own summarization, "a storage cupboard" of objective facts, is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control is found when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.

More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. This betrays the motivations of this enlightenment foundation. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it can then wieve a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). And therefore better and more necessary.

Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence). And yet, treating science as a worldview would lead us exactly to where someone like Hawkin's is going with the data.

Midgley pushes further to speak of enlightenment morality as a social contract that upholds the rights of the individual in ways that demand us versus them pardigms. This of course exposes the foundation of a scientific worldview that needs this notion of primitive to enlightened to uphold our notions of progress. This has only become muddled in light of globalism, something that has thrown our conceptions of responsiblity to one another into chaos. When values and ideals are held captive to the notion of social constructs, how can it be possible to say that oppression is inherently bad in all places and all ways in all of life. And yet the enlightenment ideal of the unity of all defined as the liberty of the individual must say this, even as the natural world that we occupy pushes back. That this is a tension that always by its nature exists within a culture not between different cultures is one of Midgley's more astute points.

On eft neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the simple observation that reasoning is powered by feeling and all feeling is rooted in reason, and yet we occupy space in a culture that elevates thought, or a kind of thought that has to do with data and information, as the primary source of objective truth. Which of course sidelines and deligitimizes the role of subjective truth. As though data is what frees us and all else must bend to it in order to be true and rational. Thus the contractual language is the scientific language and the unity language is the language of feeling (hence: irrational), and yet the enlightenment uses the latter to justify the former.

If Midgely sees a way out of this it is through understanding how so much of this traverses the dominant scientific language of our time. Where atomism dominated so did certain conceptions of a mechanical world full of meat machines. Where physics as replaced it comes opportunities to reimagine the world using a different metaphor. And in some ways to reenchant it by reaching back into one of its most formative tools- myth. Here we move from reductionism to complexity, or a sort of science that is not demanding a unified theory of everything but rather recognizes that different ways of knowing are all participating in the same conversation, which is what is knowledge (or true knowledge) and how is it that we know anything at all. Here science is but one part of a larger conversation, and even within science are the different sciences that inform the discipline within its different areas of concern. She uses the illustration later in the book of a map, which I think is helpful. We can have 20 different maps all speaking of the same observed and experienced reality or world, but all categorically different perspectives. This is how knowledge works.

Most imporantly, it is on this front that we find the freedom to locate knowledge outside of oursevles. That we are free to see values as occupying its own space, even as part of the same conversation. In fact, as Midgley points out, it is only within the different disciplines that value can be truly established. Humanism, for example, or the natural sciences, are the only places where values can be imposed on its subject from the outside. Which becomes an interesting discussion where myth is involved. Because such an acknolwedgment must at once recognize that it is the human subject affording this value, and yet it is also being pulled from the outside. Such is the nature of the discipline. Here Midgely points out that it is simply not the case, as the enlightenment has been want to believe, that we can move from a world of belief in God to a world in which the God is made human. Here science masquerades as ideology and value systems. Not just an age where we use science, but an age where we are guided by science. Since all human socities have engaged in science, it is the "guided" part that distinguishes the modern age. It wants to root all of the things science can't be or do in science, while similtaneously defining science as the essential "human" accomlishment that raises us to the role God once occupied. It is "we" who have made the world better because of science. And it is the we that must be better than "them" in the myth of progress

This is my own aside, but it is interesting that the Christian story does in fact speak of a historical moment in which God is made human. The key difference is that this movement comes from the outside. It roots all value making in the notion that where all things exist in relationship, all relationship is rooted in Truth. It is that Truth that has the authority to afford the subject of this natural world value. As her final chapters unpack and point out, all else leaves us captive to the wildness of nature, forever attempting to reconcile evil as good and good as evil within the contexts and paramters of our social concern. Such becomes the illusive ebb and flow of our moral constructs, leaving us enslaved to irrational justifications of the natural world.

And really, this is the central problem. As Midgley points out, the scientific worldview represents knowledge as "building" information rather than as interaction with the world. It takes out that relationship componant which allows complexity to have a kind of agency in the conversation, and instead reduces the world to that which we can control. Hence why such a worldview is really about the progress of technology. Because in the end this is what intelligence becomes when we bind ourselves to such a myth (properly defined, not as a story that isn't true, but as a story that brings to light the truths we are being shaped by). One such facinating insight the book provides is this concept of science looking both ways. If we can see science as the central human function that informs our relating to the world, captured as it is through all the varied disciplines it embodies, this allows us to look both ways, towards nature and towards God. Here Midgley is using God more as a metaphor, but I think she also gets at why "religion" is one of those necessary disciplines. It is as much a part of the world as anything else. Where we root that becomes a further discussion, but what's important to note is that in both directions we are looking away from outselves and towards the whole. Defining one depends on our ability to define both. Even more so, how we define one dictates how we define the other. Which is why the stories, the myths, we tell are the ones we live by, precisely because they reflect what we really understand to be true about this world, this reality.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must-have keystone to form the basis of any library dedicated to enhancing critical thinking. Mary Midgely provides an incisive analysis of what she calls ‘societal myths’, ideas taken for granted in our mental and social discourse, which have pervaded western thinking since the age of the European enlightenment. Some of these ‘myths’ are at the ‘high level’, like the primacy of freedom relative to other societal or individual values. Other ‘myths’ are at the ‘lower level’, like the myth of progress and self-directed evolution, or what I would call the ‘myth of selection’ as a force in biological and social systems. These myths have influenced politics, science, and philosophy, and the book definitely helpsto refine the meta-ideas we use to think about these subjects .

The book divides into two narratives that are cohesive and each self-contained. The first part is decidedly more academic since it is a critique of post-enlightenment myths. These myths can broadly characterized as the myths of the social contract, the myth of the omnicompetence of science, and the myth of societal progress, or iterative and purposeful evolution of improvements in society across a plethora of fields, from technology to thought, over time . Some of these ideas, like natural selection have their place in very specific applications, like population genetics; yet, they have in recent years suffered from their haphazard application by intellectuals in other fields, like sociology, psychology, or economics. In a way, these misapplications resemble verbal malapropisms, something that sounds similar to what you are seeing but isn’t when one clarifies what is actually being said.

The second ‘part’ changes the narrative and refocuses on ethics, as it pertains to biotechnology, a seemingly strange detour, which may be an artifact of the time at which this book was being researched and written, the late nineties and early aughts. While the change in direction seems odd at first, it makes more sense once we account for the historical context of the writing. Much like how the concept of AI has enthralled the imagination of the public today in the late 2010s, the popular imagination of the late nineties and early aughts was captured by genetics and bioengineering. Pop culture films such as Jurassic Park and Gattaca demonstrate how far the obscure ethical issues of applying genetics to animals or humans had penetrated the public thought during this time. This era also saw great advancements in the actual science of genetics with the human genome project, whose completion led to the formation of several new fields including bioinformatics and computational and synthetic biology. These academic advancements have gone mostly unnoticed by the public, but the work in these fields has been steadily progressing towards a better understanding of micro and nano-biology.

Against this backdrop of history, Midgley’s focus on genetics and bioengineering seems more natural, and she deals with several interesting concepts during her analysis, including the ethics of practicing synthetic biology, the human construction and redesign of organisms with the tools of the genome. She addresses how we label the apparent revulsion society has for the idea of forming or altering life as we know it, a so-called yuck factor. Through a historical analysis she links this revulsion to xenotransplantation, and even earlier still to the myth of the chimera. These chimerical creatures of mythology took the form of a human-animal hybrid, like the Minotaur, and were viewed as unnatural and repulsive much like the products of modern-day genetic engineering.

She continues to analyze the dichotomy between humans and animals and the myth that there is any real separation between the two. This section deals more with everyday thoughts that people have on the ethical treatment of animals and whether animals are capable of cognition like people. There is a convincing argument that the animal human partition seen across several societies is basically the same phenomena of the in-group versus out-group partition of tribal behavior, the simple labelling of some people as the “other”. By labeling animals as the other, humans lower the cooperation required for members of the in-group, specifically humans themselves, to excuse their cruel actions towards animals. Midgely assesses the gradation of “otherness” for various animals, showing not only why certain animals are viewed as closer to humans, but how negative traits attributed to certain animals like snakes, wolves, rats and so forth are extended to humans when some groups label other humans as being like these animals, and furthermore, how this labeling serves as an excuse to abuse these labeled people.

As interesting and applicable as this last third of the book may be, the most interesting content is found in the first two-thirds of the book, which mostly deals with the decidedly more abstract topic of dissecting the myth of the omnicompetence of science. This myth is tackled along several fronts, but the most compelling is a deconstruction of how the mechanistic worldview has informed the construction of mathematical theories of society, as well as how certain concepts from the natural sciences, such as physics, have been inappropriately grafted onto the social sciences. The main theme of these critiques is focused against the practice of axiomatic reductionism or the over-economizing of complexity into simplicity for the sake of a seemingly clean analysis and inference framework. This approach has led to various forms of “people-as-atoms” paradigms for the social sciences, which Midgely maintains mimic the form of the mechanical physical sciences but have not led to much insight into the subject matter itself.

Midgley’s analysis of the theory of the meme, first pioneered by biologist Richard Dawkins, as well as the naïve application of Darwinian selection to sociological or psychological phenomenon are especially interesting as analyses of the mechanistic approach in the social sciences, and she clearly presages criticisms that have recently started to emerge within these fields themselves.

Interestingly enough, this trend has only continued to our modern era in fields like computing. Ideas like thermodynamic entropy have mutated into similar notions like the Shannon entropy, which has both yielded an entirely new field, Information Theory, which similarly to the theory of the meme is hard to place in a box with respect to its proper position in the pantheon of the natural and social sciences. These mutations have also started to inform the methodologies of subjects like machine learning and information economics and are now used as critical measures for everything from income inequality to the predictive potential of algorithms. Had Midgley lived to see this development, I believe she would find it both fascinating and ultimately vindicating her observations of the incestuous and promiscuous nature of ideas to cross-pollinate, valid or not, in our modern era.

Overall, this book is a tour-de-force. It’s surprising that it’s not better well-known. It is well-suited for several different audiences. First, those who are currently working on one of the sciences, especially the quantitatively driven ones, or those who work in a data-centric subject area. This book provides a clear counterpoint to the principles one may have taken as axiomatic because of one’s exposure to and studies into these subjects, and as such, it can help inform a critical introspection to remove the hidden lbiases and unsound predicates imbibed. The second is a more general modern audience who seeks to sharpen their critical thinking skills to help navigate the current era of unsound ideas being amplified by internet technologies. The practice and analysis found in this book will help one sieve out fallacies and unfounded ideas much easier from among the ever-growing universe of dross ideas found online. The only issue I have with this text is that it was not longer and more extensive. Highly recommended.

[Debs Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a stretch read for me in many places but I engaged with her central ideas of myths we have assimilated and how they shape the way we analyze and respond to our world. She covers a range of these, and in several chapters circles back to previously mentioned myths to show how they recur in our thinking in different areas. I particularly appreciated her attack on the reductive approach by many, flattening the nuance and complexity of problems. I also resonated with her dissection of the mechanistic myth and dualism as that dovetailed with other reading I have done. A little dated in places, a little over my head in others, but generally a clearly articulated breakdown of myths we believe and I loved the concluding statement: “They [hyper-civilized people] are changing the myth in order to commit themselves to changing the wider reality, and that is the way in which serious changes are eventually brought about”.

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A polemic but a closely argued one. Midgely traces back the intellectual failure of nerve and imagination in the face of issues such as climate change or gender/race/wealth inequalities to the faultline imposed between the (in themselves) problematic categories of mind and body or the civilised and the wild. She shows how certain monomyths colonised our attitudes to science and the humanities and argues that we have to recognise and challenge those myths if humanity is to have any hope of making substantive changes in our attitudes to each other and the world we live.
It isn't a perfect book and it could be fairly claimed that hers isn't a balanced argument. But it could equally well be seen as a necessary corrective to an increasingly toxic materialist orthodoxy rooted in a flawed metaphysics.
(And, boy, does she annoy the Dawkins fanboys and fangirls.)

[Tarun Rattan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Mary Midgley explores the common myths of modern civilisation. According to the author myths are not lies nor are these detached stories but instead these are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. And these myths shape its meaning, the way in which we imagine the world determines what we think important in it. Primarily the author has focussed on three current myths i.e. the social contract myth, the progress myth and the myth of omnicompetent science. The author is clear in her viewpoint that trying to explain world in any particular framework is ultimately going to be futile as reality is always turning out to be a great deal more complex than people expect. The author lays bare the futility of the notion that human behaviour, like the material universe, is amenable to scientific investigation and the society and government should be studied scientifically in the interest of human happiness.

On the social contract myth, the author writes quite succinctly that “on the issue of human rights it has been quite important that the reductive, contractual pattern was seen as the rational one and as being supported by physical science. The idea that people are solitary, self-contained, indeed selfish individuals, who wouldn’t be connected to their neighbours at all if they didn’t happen to have made a contract, looked rational because it reflected the atomic theory of the day, a theory that similarly reduced matter to hard, impenetrable, disconnected atoms like billiard balls. The two patterns, of political and scientific atomism, seemed to strengthen each other, and, for some time, each appeared as the only truly rational and scientific pattern of understanding in its own sphere. Social atomism, expressed as political and moral individualism, got quite undeserved support from the imagery used in science.” Her critique of Marxism is scathing, she believes that Marxism is a misguided attempt at social atomising and that “exaggerated and distorted ideas about what physical science can do for us led, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the rise of powerful, supposedly scientific ideologies such as Marxism and behaviourism. These systems are obviously not actually part of physical science but, by claiming its authority, they have injured its image.” She did not stop at that and said that "Marxist theory moved from an immensely abstract general principle about causation – that all changes proceed from conflict – to deduce results about a particular political conflict in which its founders had already taken sides.”

She did not only attack left ideologies but laid bare the "social Darwinism” behind capitalist ideology. According to her “this (capitalist) deception is even more obvious in the social Darwinist project that has been Marxism’s main rival and that seems to have outlived it, persisting vigorously today as a belief in the supremacy of market forces.” She covers in detail how the Darwinistic notion of heterogeneity has been used with an agenda to call for the utmost political freedom and above all, for free trade. The prophets of Capitalism took Darwin’s theory and misrepresented it to proclaim that commercial freedom would ensure ‘the survival of the fittest’. Herbert Spenser in fact named this as the basic principle of ‘evolution’, a word whose meaning he was largely responsible for developing and which Darwin carefully avoided. Accordingly (said Spencer), the working of this principle must on no account be disturbed by charitable attempts to help the unfit – that is, the poor.

On the omnipotence of science she quoted Nehru saying that “it is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people . . . The future belongs to science and to those who make friends with science.” She criticised such notions where there was an attempt to create a whole new ideology, a moral approach that would justify using those facts to change society in a quite particular way. She mentions that the term “scientific" often has not stood for any particular form of scientific knowledge but for a new scale of values, a new priority system, leading to particular political projects. People such as B. F. Skinner, who claimed that ‘we live in a scientific age’, did not just mean an age that used science. They meant an age that is guided by science, an age that, in some way, chooses its ideals as well as its medicines and its breakfast foods on grounds provided by scientific research. This new system was certainly not seen as value-free but as a moral signpost that could take the place of religion.

Another myth author counters is the myth of multiculturalism or multi pluralism which ultimately leads to fanaticism. She warns against failing into the trap and says that “fanatics are not just stern moralists, they are obsessive ones who forget all but one part of the moral scene. They see no need to respect ideals that seem to conflict with their chosen ones, or to work out a reconciliation between them. This frame of mind is not, of course, peculiar to full-time fanatics. It is easy to fall into it whenever one is, for the moment, completely absorbed in some good cause, and good causes often do seem to demand that kind of absorption.”

An excellent eye-opener, people should read more of Mary Midgley to understand what is going wrong with the modern civilisation.

[Lyndon · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning." I was tracking with Midgley's argument to about 3/4 in, then I found myself wearied under the weight of the "Prometheus" myth which informs (so it seems) the majority of mis-steps humanity has taken in its relation with the world (the 'world' in this work principally being the biosphere and intellectual history of the West). The book seemed to have no conclusion. It just ended.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy with a passion for action. This is one of the best books I've read. Very accessible, each point is clearly weighed up. Read it if you want a revelation into how we are tricked by myths in every aspect of society. This book o
Is a call to waken up to moral, social, environmental and species responsibility. A call to stewardship (to steal an idea from Genesis but thankfully Midgely does not refer to).

[Ida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Todella mielenkiintoista pohdintaa tieteestä, mutta myös monimutkaista. Tähän täytyy palata vielä useita kertoja.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

I obviously need a philosophical primer. This made very little sense.

[Rory Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable wander through some important topics in the borderlands of philosophy, ethics and science. Its core message could have been delivered in significantly less than the 208 pages of the book.

The central ideas are pertinently expressed. We hear that social contract theory is ‘disastrously parochial’ (Kindle 8%) because the idea of a society determining its own rights and rules doesn’t explain how or why a society can then try to apply ‘human rights’ (58%) into other societies. Fair point! This is indeed a serious and unresolved problem at the heart of Western philosophical and Political thought.

The author’s critique of excessive deference to science also makes some good points, although there is considerable overlap with issues raised in her earlier book, ‘Evolution as Religion.’ Yes there are risks of ‘intellectual imperialism’ (9%) with Enlightenment models of science. And yes reductiveness is a logical hygiene which throws out its garbage based on presuppositions and assumptions about what counts as rubbish (18%).

For example, reality can be simplified by becoming materialists and rejecting the idea of anything that is immaterial. But it can just as logically be simplified in the opposite direction by rejecting matter and retreating into a Phenomenalistic Idealism (22%) or reducing everything to consciousness (28%). Which approach is the ‘right’ one, and how should we even go about answering that question?

Science has a lot to say to the modern world but it cannot even begin to answer questions like those, as they are about the values and orientation which are presupposed by Science. In raising these issues the author is calling for a humility which recognises its limitations, rather than bombastically and thoughtlessly insisting upon its own superiority.

The last third of the book deals with issues around ecology and animals. Pejorative comments which compare people to animals show that people have a very sharp distinction between superior humanity and inferior animality (73%). Some of these views are based upon assumptions that only humans have consciousness (77%). But is this true? Is it even a justified viewpoint ?

The author insists that we treat babies as if they have thoughts, feelings and consciousness, so shouldn’t we treat animals in the same way? Shouldn’t animals be considered as honorary humans (79%) with their own equivalent to human rights (82%)?

The analogy between babies and animals is unconvincing. We have no reason to deny that babies posses feelings, thoughts and consciousness, of a sort; because we can see that they are growing on a continuum where that is an undeniable outcome. The (mental) outcome for animals is much less clear, so there have to be very real questions about the appropriateness of a comparison with a baby.

However, the point is well made that there is no reason to think that consciousness (and thought and feelings) must be something which things either have, or do not have. Could these qualities be possessed in degrees? We don’t know, and perhaps more pertinently, we cannot know. So, a proper rationality on these issues must be necessarily humble and open minded.

[Keerthi Vasishta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite my disagreements with her rather sweeping generalization of the purpose of reductive logic, Midgley geniunely held my attention with her book. She asks impressive questions of the purpose of science and knowledge but somehow her fascination with 'holistic' systems like Gaia let her down. It transforms her book from a sophisticated and tautalogical analysis of the history of thought into a book of arguing for the eco-critical centredness of a true holistic approach to knowledge. My entire problem with Midgley was not what she was saying, and certainly not how she was saying it but with the msicued faith in attempting to put hard science back in its place as a cousin of the Humanities. As a student of the Humanities as much as it is right to claim the Science and Humanities are mere equivalent branches of Human enquiry, the idea that something as vague and enigmatic as pseudo-philosophical hogwash as Gaia as a modern counterpart to unify in many ways the Descartes-ian split and Enlightenment hierarchy failed to stand up to scrutiny.
I still found myself largely enjoying the book which is accessible, honest and piercing in many parts.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. How myths work
2. Our place in the world

Scientific Reductionism
3. Progress, science and modernity 13
4. Thought has many forms 21
5. The aims of reduction 29

Dualism
6. Dualistic dilemmas 36
7. Motives, materialism and megalomania 43
8. What action is 47
9. Tidying the inner scene: why memes? 56 really good critique
10. The sleep of reason produces monsters 61
11. Getting rid of the ego 68
12. Cultural evolution? 75
13. Selecting the selectors 82
14. Is reason sex-linked? 88
15. The journey from freedom to desolation 94
16. Biotechnology and the yuk factor 102
17. The new alchemy
18. The supernatural engineer 114
19. Heaven and earth, an awkward history 122
20. Science looks both ways 128

Animals
21. Are you an animal? 135
22. Problems about parsimony 142
23. Denying animal consciousness 146
24. Beasts versus the biosphere? 153
25. Some practical dilemmas 158
26. Problems of living with otherness 163
27. Changing ideas of wildness

[Willow Rankin · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

This book had some interesting though provoking ideas - one in which "the building blocks of life" and how this thought process has us view the world in its sub component parts. Whilst this is an interesting concept the author offers no differing view point and what this really means and how it affects us.

Further, I could not get past the overly complicated, flowery use of language. So much so, that I didn't finish the book. Alot of what was written could of been done with half the words. The writing was not accessible to someone like me, who doesn't read philosophy books on a regular basis, and instead found the concept interesting enough to want to read.

[John Dolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a clear and readable style (not something you always associate with philosophers), this is a great introduction to the work of Mary Midgley. She covers a lot of ground: our over-dependence on the infallibility of science (and our failure to see its limits); the myths and assumptions we take for granted (and don't even necessarily recognize they are myths/assumptions); Homo sapiens' over-inflated view of himself and his entitlements to the detriment of other species (and even the planet itself). There is much food for thought here. I need to read more of her writings.

[Nosemonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a neat, thought-provoking reappraisal of many of the assumptions underlying Western mindsets, from binary thinking to post-Enlightenment trust in misunderstandings about science, to the way we treat animals and the natural world. Borderline five stars, with one dropped simply for feeling a little dated (though not by as much as I was expecting - the attacks on Richard Dawkins felt especially current, given how he's fallen out of favour).

[Md Ashik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A "thought prosecution" of the common frames that we were taught to accept and reproduce, the book invokes a tough questioning of the hows and whys of myths. It also fits and flows into the growing social literature studying myths and ideologies that relate to the everyday calcification of inequality.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Generally good points on the problem of looking for universal solutions, reasonable explanation of how myths govern our lives, but doesn't fully get the 'myth is meaning' idea e.g. with her comments about animal symbolism, she points out the lack of rooting in biological reality when biological reality was not the point of the mythical meaning of animals.