LET’S ALL GO TO THE ZOO ZOO ZOO

You can be a beast, but I'm human (Raymond Tallis, The Times, October 29th, 2005)

There are three main secular currents of anti-humanism that need skewering: biological reductionism; the marginalisation of consciousness; and postmodernist fantasies based upon the fallacies of “informationism”. Let’s start with biological reductionism, the belief that we are essentially animals — our apparently profound differences from other beasts are based on flattering self-deception. The increasing acceptance of these ideas stems from overestimation of what On The Origin of Species tells us about human nature. Scientific Darwinism has been transformed into an unscientific Darwinitis, according to which we are born hard-wired into the biosphere, and pretty well everything about us can be explained in terms of the survival of the genome — the reproduction of the means of reproduction. But we are quite different from other species, if only because, as the philosopher Schelling pointed out, it is in us that, “Nature opens its eyes . . . and notices that it exists.” We are the only species that quarrels over its own nature and has written about the origin of species.

The plausibility of biologism has been enhanced by a grotesque exaggeration of the extent to which we understand our nervous systems and the relationship between the nervous system and ordinary human consciousness. For the record, satisfactory neural explanations of human consciousness elude us. My research for the past 20 or more years has been in neuroscience, and it seems to me that, in terms of the metaphysical understanding of the relationship between neurology and selfhood, we are no farther on from Hippocrates, who noticed that when people banged their heads they behaved a bit oddly and that decapitation was associated with a fall in IQ (in most cases, anyway). We know that a normally functioning brain is a necessary condition of consciousness but it is not a sufficient condition, and we have no idea what fills the gap between the necessary and sufficient.

Once we set aside a misreading of Darwin and the glamour of hyped-up neuroscience, biological reductionism loses its credibility and we can see what is in front of our eyes: that we who lead our lives are not at all like beasts who merely live them.

Ironically, the dominant strands of anti-humanism have been fostered within the humanities departments of universities. Many ideas have been embraced because they seem scientific. That they come with a complex jargon, are often opaque and frequently counter-intuitive, is very gratifying for academics. Over the past 40 or more years, souped-up Freudianism and souped-up Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism — to mention some of the longer-lasting trends — have had a huge influence on what is taught, published and avowed in academic arguments.

One feature that these ideas have in common is a marginalisation of the conscious human agent, and a corresponding claim that we are in the grip of forces that, unless we go to university, will be hidden from us. The psychological unconscious of Freud (and Lacan), the historical unconscious of Marx (and Althusser) and the semiotic unconscious of everyone else on the curriculum are upheld by assertion rather than fact. Generations of students have been persuaded by the confidence of their teachers that they are tossed around by intra-psychic forces arising out of the failure of their animal instincts to come to terms with the demands of civilisation. Or that the ideas that ruled in them were the ideas of the ruling class, and those ideas were in turn determined by the material conditions created by evolving technologies and the imperative to reproduce the means of production. Or that the self was merely a set of nodes in a system of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, so that far from speaking language, language spoke in them. They were soluble fish in a sea of discourse, whose dominant forms — and what passed for objective truth — were determined by power.

Two minutes’ intelligent discussion — not available in many humanities departments for several decades — would have been sufficient to dispose of these assertions. In the end, they have started to die of boredom and in-fighting. Their stupefying influence, however, has not yet gone away.

The disconnect between the theories of Darwin, Freud and Marx and the reality of what we experience in our everyday lives is a source of much modern humour, misguided politics and even emotional illness. Darwinism, which seems so sensible and compelling when describing animals (the smaller and dumber the better) bounces back and forth between the ridiculous and the banal when trying to explain humans. We are all Freudians now in the ready confidence with which we attribute the behaviour of others entirely to objective psychological forces we reject out of hand as adequate explanations for our own behaviour. Similarly with Marxism and its derivatives, we are led almost automatically to rote socio-economic explanations for people from faraway lands who fly airplanes into skyscrapers without pausing to ponder why we don’t view such as an appropriate response to our own financial and social stresses.

What makes these three theories such tenacious adversaries is that they are not “wrong” in any objective sense–they all offer nuggets of insight into the human condition. Their destructiveness lies in their pretensions to comprehensiveness and their relentless, dogmatic exclusion of subjective experience and human consciousness. Reality is in the lab, not the street, and we are all mice in one huge maze. It is this tenaciously-held faith that supports the livelihoods of millions and leads modern academia to be so extreme and strident in its rejection of religious influence or even inquiry. Ones hope Professor Tallis is right that the battle against human consciousness and free will is being lost, but the war is far from over.