ONE OF THE first intellectual tasks for the 21st century is to bury the false ideas about humanity fostered in the latter half of the 20th century. There is much at stake: the notion that human beings are conscious moral agents, able to influence, if not control, their collective future, is of supreme importance. Abandon it, and we may as well abandon hope for a better tomorrow.

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.

Finally, we have been subjected to much talk about a “post-human” future, in which life based upon flesh and carnal experience, and interactions between human beings, is replaced by life based upon bits of information that pass between machines and are under no one’s control. Much of this is founded on a misuse of that chameleon word “information”, and the belief that information can exist outside of human consciousness. It is also based upon hype. You may remember Marvin Minskey’s claim that computers would be so sophisticated, by 1990 that they would own us as household pets. Well, no such computers have been constructed. The hype, however, goes on.

It is obvious, then, that in thinking about humanity in the 21st century, there is still a lot of colonic material of a taurine provenance — otherwise known as bullshit — to be cleared out.

Raymond Tallis is author of Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents.

DEBATE

Raymond Tallis will be speaking in London this weekend at the Battle of Ideas, two days of robust and open debate
www.battleofideas.co.uk

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone