Mary Midgley and Elaine Brook, on stage at Hay. Photo: Martin Godwin
It is difficult not to admire Mary Midgley. At 86 and white-haired, she is still going strong: cogent, vigorous and impassioned. Clad in brilliant fuchsia jacket, she shone the beam of her moral philosopher's intellect on how the perception of (her contemporary) James Lovelock's concept of Gaia has evolved. It is no longer, she said, "a Californian fancy", the plaything of well-meaning eco-cranks.
The instrumental idea that, at bottom, only the economy is "real", and the rest of human affairs just window-dressing, has been exploded, she argued. Faced with the evidence of climate change, few people in public life can now maintain that we can go on treating the planet as a bottomless pit of inert resources, rather than a systemic whole of interdependent ecologies and living organisms.
The scientific basis of the Gaia theory has largely been accepted - witness the growth of "earth sciences" departments in universities - even if the word "Gaia" itself, she conceded, is still eschewed. It sounds like a religious concept, she acknowledged, but - momentarily reprising her great disagreement with Richard Dawkins - "no more religious than the 'selfish gene'".
This went down well with the audience, which was notably senior (average age certainly closer to 60 than 50) - a marked contrast with many sessions at the Hay Festival, but perhaps a mid-week phenomenon of retirees coming out to play. But then it all went pearshaped, for me at least, when Elaine Brook started up.
Chiming at first with Mary Midgley that Gaia was getting past the popular misconception that it was some kind of new-agey "hippy thing", Ms Brook then went on to exemplify exactly that. When she told us that we need more "human-centred stories", I started feeling queasy. When she asked us to think of dragons and asked what image came to mind, I could feel my bile rising. And when she closed with a call for us to compose "poems, songs and stories about the interconnectedness of the web of life", I was ready to hurl.
After this flabby, tree-hugging stuff, you could have got me to pay good money to be part of the studio audience for Top Gear - just to remind myself who the real enemy is. But a more serious question nagged at me: why was an intellectual giant like Mary Midgley sharing a platform, apparently approvingly, with such a stereotype-affirming pigmy as this? With friends like these ...
It made me worry that, despite the rationalism of her own discourse, Ms Midgley's championing of a spiritual dimension in human affairs requires a necessary suspension of rigour. How else can one sit there nodding at a fellow Gaiaist's well-intentioned waffle as if it was worth something?
I was ready to believe Gaia had made it into the epistemological mainstream. Now, I'm not so sure.
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