Letters

Stefan Collini, reviewing Polly Toynbee’s family memoir, records anecdotes about Gilbert and Mary Murray, whose youngest son, Stephen, was my father (LRB, 6 June). Collini is sceptical, but my father did himself tell the story of managing to bring the Daily Worker into his parents’ house (‘as long as the servants don’t see it’). He often followed that up with a tale of his mother, Lady Mary, discovering a copy of the Daily Express in the entrance hall and ordering a servant to remove it with a pair of tongs. Illustrating the distance between the highmindedness of that class and the reality of most people’s lives is the story of Lady Mary and Lady Lindsey (wife of the master of Balliol), both Quakers, who learned that the girls at the Oxford branch of Woolworth’s were so badly paid some of them had resorted to prostitution to make ends meet. Appalled, they walked to the shop, demanding to see the manager ‘to formally remove their custom’. Bertrand Russell, a cousin of Lady Mary (lending a little more weight to the intellectual genealogy discussed by Collini), recalled that his grandmother never sat on an upholstered chair until after dinner on the grounds that it might lead to lassitude. The liberalism of those times was bound with a pretty tight moral corset.

‘Have Britain’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another?’ Stefan Collini asks. Virginia Woolf thought so. In Night and Day, she reflects on ‘hereditary genius’: ‘The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the Millingtons and the Otways seem to prove that the intellect is a possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the privileged race.’

Stefan Collini’s piece about the Toynbees reminded me of Stephen Jay Gould’s remark on the size of Albert Einstein’s brain: ‘I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.’ Collini seems to find it remarkable that one family produced so many intellectuals. The truth is that it didn’t. What the family in fact produced was a group of people able to take advantage of one another’s connections.

Anil Gomes says that Daniel Dennett was a naturalist, and many would agree with him (LRB, 20 June). They’d be wrong, since Dennett denied the existence of the only wholly natural thing of whose existence we are absolutely certain: consciousness, consciousness as ordinarily understood, sensory experience, emotional experience, pain, experiential qualia of any sort – including the experience of reading this sentence. To be a naturalist, a real naturalist, you have to acknowledge the existence of consciousness. The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin puts it well when he says that qualia must be understood ‘as aspects of nature. That is our commitment to naturalism – the philosophy that asserts that all that exists is part of the natural world science studies.’

Dennett had no such commitment. Like most of those who today call themselves naturalists, he was a false naturalist. He thought – astonishingly – that science, and physics in particular, ruled out the existence of consciousness (as ordinarily understood). He never got the point that Bertrand Russell made so many times: that while physics tells us a great deal about the structure of the world, it is silent on the question of the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure its rules and equations describe. Dennett made the great mistake of his philosophical generation. He was sure (just like Descartes, whom he reviled) that we know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical. He made the mistake in the face of all the evidence – the evidence of science – that the stuff of the world is profoundly strange, far stranger, it seems, than we can ever hope to understand. Dennett was, in this respect, a fanatic. Religious fanatics believe in the existence of something for which there is no evidence. Dennett went further: he denied the existence of something whose existence is certain. (If he is right, there has never been any pain or suffering or joy; not really.)

After asserting, with Dennett, that ‘consciousness can’t be reconciled with science,’ Gomes goes on to deride panpsychism. He compares it with Descartes’s positing of an immaterial substance, and calls it a form of ‘magic’. The central tradition of panpsychism is, however, resolutely materialist, from Margaret Cavendish on. It rejects Descartes’s dualism and has nothing to do with magic. Most anglophone philosophers were clear on the point a hundred years ago: ‘Panpsychism must be considered a species of naturalism,’ R.W. Sellars wrote in 1927. Panpsychism may or may not be true, and physicists aren’t very good at metaphysics, but we should perhaps pay attention to what some Nobel Prize-winning physicists think: that ‘the mental and the material are … two sides of the same thing’ (Hendrik Lorentz); that ‘the material universe and consciousness are made out of the same stuff’ (Erwin Schrödinger); that ‘consciousness [is] fundamental’ and ‘matter [is] derivative from consciousness’ (Max Planck); that ‘consciousness and matter [are] different aspects of one thing’ (Louis de Broglie).

Hal Foster writes that in Paris ‘Breton was close to the Afro-Cuban-Chinese artist Wifredo Lam’ (LRB, 6 June). What’s more, the two were among the hundreds of passengers at risk aboard Le Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, which Victor Serge called ‘a cargo boat converted into an ersatz concentration camp of the sea’. It left Marseille for Mexico on 25 March 1941; the journey included the stopover in Martinique that Foster mentions. Other passengers included the Romanian cartoonist Saul Steinberg, Austria’s ‘raging reporter’ Egon Kisch, Anna Seghers and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Aboard ship, Lévi-Strauss and Breton carried on a lively discussion concerning ‘the relationships between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality’. Lévi-Strauss noted that the Surrealist ‘was very much out of place dans cette galère, [striding] up and down the few empty spaces left on deck; wrapped in his thick nap overcoat, he looked like a blue bear.’

In Tom Crewe’s account of the last fourteen years of Conservative government, he repeats something that has become a shibboleth of progressive thought: that Boris Johnson’s ‘dither and delay’ during the Covid pandemic ‘cost lives’ (LRB, 20 June). For the combined years 2020 and 2021, according to figures published in the Lancet, the UK’s excess death rate was 126.8/100,000, close to that of France and Germany and far lower than the US or Italy. As Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh, has written, ‘the case for the second lockdown in England remains weak.’ Scotland (which did not have one), Wales (which had a short ‘firebreak’) and England had similar excess deaths, respectively, 130.6, 135.5 and 125.8 per 100,000 population.

Ian Ellison mentions a small silver bottle in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (Letters, 6 June). It was donated in 1926, he writes, by ‘a Miss M.A. Murray’, who had been assured by an old woman living near Hove that its stopper prevented a dangerous witch from escaping. The largely home-educated Margaret A. Murray (1863-1963) contrived to become an Egyptologist of some distinction, studying under W. Flinders Petrie and teaching at University College London until she retired in 1935. But though she wrote books on Egyptology aimed at the general public, she was at least as famous for her claim that medieval and early modern witchcraft was an unbroken subterranean survival of ancient European paganism. Her books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931) reached wide audiences and influenced neo-pagans such as Gerald Gardner and Robert Graves.

Malcolm Gaskill remarks that a hundred thousand prosecutions for witchcraft in Europe across three centuries is ‘not that many’ (LRB, 9 May). That is an assessment I feel compelled to contradict.

My ten-year-old granddaughter noticed the cover of the 9 May issue of the LRB lying beside her. She pointed to the line ‘Malcolm Gaskill: Could nuns fly?’ and said, ‘I guess writers don’t have anything to write about.’

Mary Wellesley’s paean to the nightingale made me think of the first time the Australian critic A.A. Phillips heard the nightingale’s song (LRB, 6 June). The title of Phillips’s essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’, from 1950, remains a universally recognised phrase in Australia for the self-conscious, insecure, anglophile strands in our culture, then and now. Phillips was in his sixties before he and his wife heard the legendary song of English poetic tradition. Writing about the moment, he recalled thinking: ‘Is that it?’ He preferred our lyrebirds and magpies.

Neal Ascherson asks how Britain avoided ‘the reflux of bitter, vengeful white settlers, police and soldiers returning to the homeland after being chased out of the newly independent colonies’ (LRB, 23 May). My grandmother was a settler in Kenya from the 1950s until independence in 1963. Afterwards the family moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and remained there until 1980, when they felt it was no longer safe. They first came to the UK for a few months and then moved to Australia. All this to say that if the UK was indeed ‘inoculated’ against a reflux of white settlers in a way that France was not, I can only offer the rationale my grandmother gave when I asked her why she didn’t consider staying in the UK: ‘The weather!’