Heroes Not Zombies

In Mary Midgley’s excellent new work, “Are You an Illusion?”, which sets out strong arguments against reductionist materialism, one of the issues she raises is about the competitive basis of the physicalist approach so dominant in the world today. The Neo-Darwinist emphasis on “survival of the fittest” is too simplistic alone to explain evolutionary change. This is not a new argument of course, but one of the points Mary Midgley makes is about how before the emergence of this theory, the more dominant strain of thought was magic….which was based on attraction. She quotes Marcilio Ficino

“All the power of magic consists in love…..The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another in virtue of their natural sympathy. The parts of the world, like the members of one animal….are united among themselves in the community of a single nature. From their communal relationship a common love is born and from this love a common attraction, and this is the true magic….Thus the loadstone attracts iron, amber, straw, brimstone, fire; the Sun draws leaves and flowers towards itself, the moon, the sea.”

This general assumption about the importance of attraction is surely just as rational a place to start from as the contrary one, popular today, that the universal force is competition.

Thought provoking.

Imagine how the world would be if we put love and attraction at the heart of our thinking instead of how to succeed at the expense of others?