Iris Murdoch Predicted Our Moral Collapse — And We Didn't Listen

Twenty-seven years ago today, Iris Murdoch died in a care home in Oxford, her extraordinary mind already stolen by Alzheimer's. The cruel irony is almost too literary for fiction: a philosopher who spent her life insisting we must pay ruthless attention to reality, losing her grip on reality itself. But here's what should really unsettle you — her novels, written between the 1950s and 1990s, describe our current moral chaos with the precision of a surgeon who somehow got hold of a time machine.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels. Twenty-six. She also published serious philosophy, taught at Oxford, carried on love affairs with both men and women that would make a soap opera writer blush, and still found time to be one of the most formidable dinner-party conversationalists in postwar Britain. If you feel unproductive after your morning coffee, Murdoch is not the person to Google.

But numbers and biography are boring. What matters is what she actually put on the page, and why it still hits like a freight train. Take "Under the Net" (1954), her debut. On the surface, it's a picaresque romp through London — a broke writer named Jake stumbles from flat to flat, chases a woman, steals a dog from a film set (yes, really), and philosophizes between hangovers. It's hilarious, fast, and deeply weird. But underneath the slapstick is a devastating argument: we trap ourselves in "nets" of theory and language, and the real world keeps slipping through. Sound familiar? In 2026, we're drowning in narratives, algorithms, and ideological frameworks, and the actual texture of lived experience is something we scroll past at sixty miles per hour.

"The Sea, the Sea" (1978) won the Booker Prize, and it deserved it, though not for the reasons the committee probably thought. Charles Arrowby, a retired theater director, retreats to a house by the sea to write his memoirs and "abjure magic." Instead, he becomes monstrously obsessed with his childhood sweetheart, now a dumpy grandmother who wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Charles convinces himself he's acting out of love. He is, in fact, acting out of ego so colossal it has its own gravitational field. Murdoch understood something that we, in the age of self-help and personal branding, still refuse to accept: most of what we call love is just narcissism wearing a nicer outfit.

And then there's "The Black Prince" (1973), which might be her masterpiece — though saying that about a Murdoch novel is like picking a favorite child in a family of twenty-six. Bradley Pearson, a blocked writer in his fifties, falls catastrophically in love with his friend's twenty-year-old daughter. It's uncomfortable, disturbing, and told with such psychological acuity that you catch yourself sympathizing with a man you should probably despise. That's Murdoch's genius. She doesn't let you sit comfortably on your moral high horse. She yanks you off it and makes you look at the mud.

What makes Murdoch terrifyingly relevant today isn't her plots — it's her obsession with one question: Can we actually see other people as they are, or do we only ever see reflections of ourselves? She was writing about this decades before social media turned every human interaction into a performance, before dating apps reduced people to curated profiles, before political discourse became two tribes screaming past each other. Murdoch knew. She knew that the fundamental human problem isn't cruelty or stupidity — it's the sheer difficulty of paying genuine attention to another person.

Her philosophy backs this up. In "The Sovereignty of Good" (1970), she argued that moral improvement isn't about willpower or dramatic choices. It's about slowly, painfully learning to see the world accurately. She used the famous example of a mother-in-law who dislikes her daughter-in-law, finding her common and juvenile. Over time, through deliberate effort, the mother-in-law adjusts her vision and sees the young woman as fresh and spontaneous instead. Nothing external changes. The revolution is entirely internal. In a culture obsessed with grand gestures, public declarations, and performative morality, Murdoch's quiet insistence on private moral work feels almost radical.

Here's where I'll get controversial: Murdoch is underread today partly because she refuses to flatter us. Modern literary fiction increasingly tells readers what they want to hear — that the right people are good and the wrong people are bad, that moral clarity is achievable, that if you just identify the correct villain, everything makes sense. Murdoch does the opposite. Her novels are populated by intelligent, educated, well-meaning people who behave appallingly, and she insists — with the patience of a saint and the ruthlessness of a coroner — that this is what humans are actually like. We don't want to hear that. We especially don't want to hear it from a woman who was herself messy, contradictory, and occasionally cruel in her personal life.

The Alzheimer's ending haunts everything. John Bayley's memoir, later filmed as "Iris" with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, showed the world what the disease did to her. But I think Murdoch would have hated the sentimentality that surrounded her decline. She was never sentimental. She would have wanted us to look at it clearly, without flinching, the way she looked at everything — and then to ask what it means about consciousness, selfhood, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Twenty-seven years on, her books sit on shelves in secondhand shops, their spines cracked by readers who discovered something uncomfortable inside and couldn't look away. They don't trend on social media. They don't get turned into Netflix series (though someone will eventually try, and it will probably be terrible). They just sit there, waiting, like a mirror you're not quite brave enough to look into.

So here's my unsolicited advice on this anniversary: pick up a Murdoch novel. Any one. "Under the Net" if you want to laugh. "The Sea, the Sea" if you want to squirm. "The Black Prince" if you want your assumptions about love and art dismantled with surgical precision. Read it slowly. Let it make you uncomfortable. Because twenty-seven years after her death, Iris Murdoch is still doing what she always did best — telling us the truth we'd rather not hear, in prose so beautiful we can't stop reading.