Book Reviews - Review 322

Mary Midgley argues that human culture and morality should properly be regarded, not as freak developments in the history of life, but as extensions of "animal nature". More particularly, as a moral philosopher and a socialist, she feels we should pay more attention to altruistic behaviour in animals, and question Tennyson's conception of nature as ineluctably "red in tooth and claw". That idea lies at the root of right-wing ideas of "social Darwinism", propounded most notably by the biologist Edward O Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology.

I am sympathetic to Midgley's moral perspective, but in much of Beast and Man she seems to be writing from a defensive position. It's true that wolves and bees co-operate, some birds pair for life, and most mammals display altruistic behaviour towards their young and, in some cases, towards other adults. Moreover, selfless impulses that start by helping species' survival in particular ways — for example the mammalian parental bond — can find themselves adapted to other purposes at a relatively low evolutionary cost. For example, exhibitions of tenderness in mating birds and mammals show similar patterns to their behaviour towards infants; and, in turn, disputes between members of a species are often resolved by one party using parasexual demonstrations of non-hostility.

So, yes, animals can behave selflessly; but it is easy to counter this observation with the utilitarian argument that their selflessness is merely "internalised" enlightened self-interest. One can also point to the total absence of altruism in non-social species, including pretty much all reptiles and amphibians. And while it's true that fights between members of a species are rarely to the death, the principle is not universal (least of all in human beings). Adult animals also frequently leave their weaker offspring to die (and sometimes even eat them), rather than allow them to drain the family's limited resources. "Love" may be a real phenomenon in animals, but nobody could call it all-conquering.

Where does this leave Midgley's argument? It's hard to say. She seems to be seeking logical justifications for her faith in human nature, but her evidence is often selective, and she sometimes takes refuge in long-winded abstraction that heads off counterargument by its very vagueness. For example:

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that she is merely extending the definition of "good" from "wanted" to "wanted a lot". As in many places in the book, the lack of examples makes it hard to tell whether Midgley isn't explaining herself well, has lost her train of thought, or is hoping that the reader won't notice that she's not taking her argument anywhere. The passage above comes from an extended consideration of "goodness", "wants" and "needs" that asks in the most abstract terms how we should define those words. The reader patiently waits for an answer, but one never comes. It is hard to differentiate her apparent understanding of "good" from the utilitarian one of "bringing the greatest benefits to the greatest number" — which would be fine if this weren't a doctrine she rejects elsewhere.

It seems to me that "goodness" in the strictly moral sense can only mean considering others' happiness independently of one's own, and acting accordingly. But to behave in such a way is surely perverse — unnatural — without the emotional impetus of empathy or a sense of duty. And from a non-teleological evolutionary perspective, "goodness" can therefore only have arisen as a phenomenon that happened to aid a species' flourishing, strengthening its power over its environment by the imposition of social bonds that transcend, to an extent, the self-interest of individuals within the species.

As an empiricist, Midgley has no time for metaphysical speculation. She rejects the idea, propounded by pessimists such as Schopenhauer, of the material world as "debased reality", and offers the usual "common sense" riposte to solipsism. ("'I' makes no sense without 'you'," she writes; maybe not, but that does not exclude the possibility that "you" are a figment of my imagination; for all that I assume this is not the case, I can't prove it when all I have to go on is my subjective perception of "you".)

Given these assumptions, Midgley is forced to ground her faith in human nature on Leibniz's assertion that we are living in "the best of all possible worlds". If the world is, admittedly, imperfect, we can work to minimise its imperfections through reason and good will.

Yet Midgley persistently ignores the ineradicable disruptive element in human nature, the blind will to power that rears its head in all species and all human societies. If cruel and callous human behaviour is, as Midgley states, "unnatural"; and if human nature is, as she states, "whole" rather than divided; then where does cruel and callous behaviour come from? The very concept of "undivided human nature" does not allow for anything unnatural in it, and an empiricist holding to it as a creed must therefore reject the idea of human morality having fundamental value. (A transcendentalist can argue from the opposite perspective, and maintain that the material world is merely a testing-ground for morality, which alone has fundamental value. But Midgley is, as far as I can tell, an avowed materialist who denies a reality deeper than the material one.)

Beast and Man is nothing if not thought-provoking. Though the thoughts it provoked in me were often counterarguments to woolly polemic, there were several chapters in which Midgley argued more cogently. These are mostly the chapters dealing with the specifics of animal and human behaviour, and they derive much of their interest from the accounts of studies of animal behaviourists such as Konrad Lorenz and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeld. When she forgets that she's trying to prove a point, and simply reports her own insights, she can write concisely eloquent prose like this:

This is an uncomfortable truth, and uncomfortable truths often bring out the best in writers.