THE FLIGHT FROM THE IMAGO DEI:

'Man is more than an overdeveloped monkey': Raymond Tallis tells spiked why he has declared a war of words on the trendy ideas that underpin 'neuromania' and 'Darwinitis'. (Tim Black, 8/04/11, spiked review of books)

In part, anger does underlie his writing. 'My primary desire is to understand things', he says, 'but then there's a secondary anger at people who misrepresent things'. And his latest book, 'the book I have been trying to write all my life', is no exception to this life-long, sometimes ire-fuelled striving for truth. Which is good news because it has made Aping Mankind - Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity into both a much-needed rebuke and a re-assertion of precisely what does make us human.

First, the rebuke. As the title indicates, the objects of Tallis's anger are those twin poles of contemporary scientism: neuromania and Darwinitis. Although it should to go without saying, given Tallis's medical past, it is still worth stating: he is no enemy of science itself, let alone neuroscience. As he puts it in Aping Mankind, neuroscience is 'one of the greatest intellectual achievements of mankind'. Rather what he objects to, what might, pre-retirement, have driven him to get up at unearthly o'clock for a frantic writing session, is the abuse of science. In this case, it means the attempt to reduce humanity to little more than unthinking matter, as utterly subject to the same laws of evolution, indeed of physics, as every other material object, organic or otherwise.

Given the ubiquity of neuromania, Tallis must be piqued daily. Newspapers carry seemingly weekly stories about the discovery of some part of the brain which is responsible for love, or humour or even God. Almost unfailingly, that all-too-familiar image of an MRI scan showing primary-coloured neural activity will sit atop the text. But these images and 'findings' are proof less of the identity of firing neurons and, say, love, than the contemporary determination to reduce our thoughts and feelings, our ideas and dreams, to a purely physical process occurring in a part of the brain. 'One gets the impression', Tallis tells me, 'that both within academe, both within science and the humanities, in the republic of letters, in the world at large and in the newspapers, there is the belief that we are our brains, and that to understand us the best way is to peer into the intracranial darkness in our skulls'.

Rest assured, however, that wherever someone is trying to penetrate the intracranial darkness, Darwinitis is never far behind. Because if the prevailing belief, no matter how half-baked, is that all mental states are physical states, then all that physical stuff - the neural impulses, the circuitry, the localised functions - and with it, our mind, has itself a causal ancestry that stretches back prior to one's own discrete physical existence. It is here that neuromania meets Darwinitis. As Tallis explains, if the mind is no more than an evolved physical organ, then its cause, like the rest of nature, is natural selection. The purpose of our mind, then, is simply to increase the likelihood that our genetic material will survive. Our mind is nothing more than a physical instrument promoting organic survival.

After a couple of drinks, Tallis provides a colourful characterisation of such rampant Darwinitis: '"For years we have thought of ourselves as special, that we have been ordained as such by God. So let's have a corrective to that and acknowledge that we're just animals. The truth about us is that we [****], we [****], we eat, we die, and anything else that matters must be related to [***]ing, [****]ing, and eating and dying, so art must be a reflection of the [***]ing, eating, [****}ing and dying complex and so on."' Tallis concludes: 'It seems true to too many people right now that we're nothing more than slightly overdeveloped chimps.'

It all just boils down to the perfectly natural desire to avoid the responsibilities that our humanity imposes on us so we can justify behaving like animals.

Posted by oj at August 5, 2011 7:06 AM
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