Raymond Tallis is that under-represented phenomenon in British culture – a serious polymath. For 40 years a consultant NHS physician and medical researcher, he is also a poet, a novelist and a philosopher, and he has written on matters as various as post-structuralism, Parmenides, epilepsy and hunger. In this collection of sparklingly intelligent essays, he brings his voracious mind to bear on, among other deep matters, God, consciousness and the NHS.
Strange bedfellows, you might say of topics rescued from potential tedium by Tallis’s often wickedly witty and subversive prose. He defends the essay form against any charge of magpie trivialism, and makes good his claim by exploring these seemingly disparate subjects with a passion that reveals their interconnected relevance.
One of Tallis’s talents is for the biting aside and irreverent nomenclature, a gift from which he does not exclude himself as an occasional target. He likes to say he is an “infidel”, having been since adolescence quite without belief in any deity. More soberly, he also describes himself as a “secular humanist”, in order to avoid the negative connotations of “atheist”. In God and Eternity for Infidels, he unravels his own dissatisfaction with an address he gave to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community (“the website address of the community – loveforallhatredfornone.org – made the invitation irresistible”). Here, he rehearses cogent arguments against the existence of God but, unlike many convinced non-believers, he is sensitive to the limits of secularism, reflecting that “the ideas of God and eternity” can seem uniquely to address “a seriousness without which life is in danger of being two-dimensional”.
He is so withering about Jeremy Hunt I almost felt sorry for the man left holding the ailing NHS baby. Almost, but not
This proclivity for seeing the other sides to large questions is typical. In the fine opening essay justifying his humanism, he writes: “Any attempt to do justice to our humanity must take into account religious beliefs: to dismiss something profound and constant in our humanity would be a strange attitude for a humanist.”
Nor is he one of those physicalists who maintain that we are “identical with our evolved brains”. For Tallis we humans are “neither spirits entirely divorced from the natural, material world, nor a heap of atoms” but something more subtly refined.
In the winningly titled On Being Thanked By a Paper Bag, Tallis develops this more nuanced idea of the mystery of human makeup in his account of current theories of consciousness. Again, his disavowal of the cynics’ reductive perspective, and his use of the “powerful myth of Christ’s passion” to illustrate “the strange process whereby human beings transform naturally occurring events into actively generated symbols”, conveys his ultimate optimism about the generative communal capacity of consciousness.
Tallis’s belief that our salvation lies in an evolving communion of intellectual advances and resources is most vividly apparent in the central essay of the collection, Lord Howe’s Wicked Dream, a ferocious attack on what he perceives as a long-hatched Tory mission to undo the NHS and deliver it into the dodgy hands of private enterprise. Taking aim first at Geoffrey Howe, Tallis dismantles the thinking and the character of various enemies of state-funded health care, most prominently Andrew Lansley, “the swivel-eyed visionary” who “conceived a plan so cunning [the 2012 Health and Social Care Act] that … if you had put a tail on it you could have made it Professor of Cunning at Oxford University”. And then there is Jeremy Hunt, about whom he is so withering that I felt almost sorry for the man left holding the ailing NHS baby today. Almost, but not. For the “failed marmalade salesman”, as Tallis, in one of his wittiest broadsides, calls him, is rightly dismissed as one who has “passed his adult life in a world where the aim is to sell as much product as possible and to maximise the profit margin”.
Tallis movingly describes how his anger at the attack on the NHS propelled him from his study on to the streets, “interrupting busy people on busy days; being dismissed as wrong or naive; or simply ignored or brushed aside”. As he says in the same essay: “Truth has become so scarce that speaking it seems at best eccentric.” We badly need “eccentrics” like Raymond Tallis, brave enough and committed enough, to speak aloud such truths.
The Mystery of Being Human is published by Notting Hill Editions (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29
The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS – review
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