Tallis - Hunger

I am very grateful to Mark Vernon and Steven Gerrard, without whom this book would not have come into being, and for their enthusiasm and support during its composition. I am also grateful to Kate Williams for her scrupulous and careful copy-editing.

The complex history of humanity and of our individual lives is most essentially the history of our hungers, and our endeavours to satisfy them. Our accidental and accident-prone lives begin not with a cry of joy, or of surprise at our existence, but of need. From our first breath to our last we are enclosed in a fundamental existential truth: that there is a gap between the state we are in and the state we would like to be in. Hunger is the experience of that gap, from which arises our misery and our joy, our hope and our despair, our wretchedness and our glory.

Any investigation of hunger conducted at the appropriate depth will quickly widen into an enquiry into human nature and the relationship between humanity and nature. It will soon be overwhelmed by the seemingly limitless variety of the pangs felt by the human animal. The nature of hunger its objects and its subjective content varies dramatically through our lives. The voracious infant raging at the empty breast will grow up into a person hungry for pleasure, success, self-esteem, power, possessions, or even for a life that seems to have a deeper or more coherent meaning. To be human is to be hungry, yes, but it is also to change hunger from a given by which we are defined to needs, passions, desires, by which we define ourselves.

Many, in some cases most, of the hungers that occupy our lives are not seen in the natural world. Even the given hunger biological hunger is transformed. At the very basic level, the fact that, as Marx and Engels pointed out, we produce the means of our subsistence, places eating at a great distance from animal feeding; and when we starve, the causes are as likely to be political as natural, to have their origins within the actions of our fellow men rather than in the processes of nature. If I were to identify the most important message of this book it would be this: notwithstanding the chastening effects of biological hunger, we humans are not to be understood in biological terms.

To this extent Hunger is a small act of resistance against the increasingly strong tide of opinion that human beings are at bottom just animals and they are at top what they are at bottom. A convergence of evolutionary theory, neuroscience and other biological disciplines has led countless thinkers to claim that we are best understood as organisms whose entire panoply of behaviour is directly or indirectly related to organic survival. The human being, we are told, is a phenotype just as in thrall to the survival of the selfish genome as an ape, a frog or a cockroach. If we are distinguished from other members of the animal kingdom, it is only a matter of our greater complexity; and, more specifically, of our ability to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have free will and that we act for reasons other than individual or group self-interest dictated by instincts.

Unfortunately, this biologism seems to have common sense and honesty on its side. The shallow knowingness that sees human hungers as essentially unreformed animal instincts as being, or boiling down to, physiological hunger is, however, wrong for a variety of reasons.

First, it overlooks the extraordinary achievements of humanity. The meanest artefact, the least complex communication, the most trivial everyday decision, the most commonplace of thoughts, goes way beyond anything seen in the animal kingdom, tapping into an almost boundless nexus of ideas, concepts, shared memories and layers of self-consciousness. One does not have to invoke symphonies, cities and the great monuments of knowledge, such as biomedical science itself, to encounter the yawning gulf between ourselves and beasts. A reflection on how, when and with what accompanying feelings we greet or withhold a greeting from someone with whom we sit down to eat is sufficient.

Secondly, biologism undermines hope for a better future. The link between animalist accounts of humanity and nihilistic despair has been increasingly clear over the past two centuries. Its most prominent recent manifestation is in some strains of Green thinking, where human beings are regarded as vermin that have over-run the planet and deserve the fate of other vermin before them. This link is most clearly exemplified in the hugely popular writings of the philosopher John Gray, for whom planet earth has been doomed by the arrogance of human beings ( Homo rapiens ) who fail to acknowledge their status as animals, believe that they have access to scientific truth and fantasize that they can alter things for the better. This attitude of contempt for the intellectual, technical and political achievements of mankind is, if it is taken seriously, dangerous as well as wrong. Grays assertion that man is just an animal (and a rather nasty one at that) leads him to the conclusion that Homo rapiens is only one of very many species and not obviously worth preserving (Gray 2002: 151). It may be alarmist to suggest that Grays ideas are anything other than the idle musings of a misanthrope, but it is important to remember that when human beings in particular regard human beings in general as animals, they may be inclined to treat one another even worse than hitherto in the domestic, local political and geopolitical spheres. One consequence of this is that those who are hungry are more likely to remain so.