Prometheus and The Eternal Sunshine

I lost my oldest friend today and it’s my fault. Before I continue let’s be clear that this friend, we’ll call him John for the sake of his privacy, has not died, or disappeared, or slipped down the back of the sofa to join the many other important things in my life that I should be more careful about. John is quite well and safe and with his family. When I say I have lost my oldest friend I mean he has un-friended me on Facebook.

I enjoin you, dear reader, to a moment of unhappy reflection on this most terrible rebuff. I myself felt compelled to cry out, ‘The horror, the horror’.

Okay so I’m being facetious and unfair. John really was a good friend. We were teenagers together, growing up in a no-account, one bus market town somewhere in rural England. We spent summer days down at the local lido starring at girls in swimsuits while smoking cigarettes and summer nights trying to get served in the local pubs by bar staff who really didn’t care that we were two years shy of being legally allowed to buy a pint of Yorkshire Bitter. We dabbled in drugs, got into scrapes, bandied ideas, formulated opinions, fell in love with the same woman and generally bounced around in that feckless, but strangely enchanting way teenagers do. Just kicking our heels, waiting for life to happen.

Later when we were both at different universities we kept in touch. The first email I ever sent was to John. He was the first to teach me what we then called netiquette. We would visit and marvel at the way life was not at all what we had expected. The last time I actually saw John was the summer of 1997. We got very drunk one Saturday night and frankly had a ball that was followed the next morning by the kind of hangover that should be prescribed under the Geneva Convention.

Not long after that, armed with an Engineering PhD and a certain genius for design, John emigrated to another part of the world. We fell out of touch, only rediscovering each other a decade later on Facebook. By then he had a beautiful family and a good and comfortable life. He employs his genius for design to make the world a better place; again for the sake of his privacy I won’t say what he does or where.

My life has had a rather more fractured and less stable trajectory but as we entered our forties you would find some difficulty in identifying immediate differences between myself and John. We were educated at the same schools, grew up in the same town, we come from the same ethnic group and strata of society, (and how arbitrary do those delineations feel even as I write them?), we are forces children, with a similar ethical outlook and set of principles. Most importantly we were friends.

So what happened?

The truth is that, for our similarities, John and I live in different paradigms.

It turns out that while, in the last twenty years, I have become an irascible sceptic as well as an ardent anti-theist and atheist along the lines of ‘The Hitch’, John has developed a rather queer and strange subset of the Creationist theory of Intelligent Design in which extra-terrestrials are responsible for human evolution.

If any off you are laughing now, you can just shut the fuck up! For the first twenty years of my life I believed that there was an omnipotent super intelligence which pervaded every single point of a Universe ninety-six billion light-years in any visible direction. This super intelligence, so I thought, knew the exact position and motion of every particle in the Universe, could interfere at any time in the laws of creation, and could read straight into my mind, where I kept all those dark secrets, such as my desire to have sex with half the girls in my year, (I had a truly inflated view of my own stamina and performance).

By comparison a rehash of the plot of the film Prometheus doesn’t sound too bad at all as a belief system.

Back to friendship, Facebook and the sceptic’s paradigm.

I post things on Facebook; memes, articles, comments. Sometimes they are about cats or mountains, sometimes they are political or philosophical, sometimes they are just plain funny. I make no apology for this; Facebook is an example of the phenomenon the networked society. It is our social space much more so than my high street or city square. It is a forum in the truest sense; it is the place for discussing ideas and thoughts, it is a place where we can look at art and the news and shout from our soap box. It is the venue for debate. For this reason I have set the privacy policy on Facebook such that anybody can read it. I don’t intend to hide, I am open and, in so far as I can judge, I am intellectually and morally honest.

So the other day I posted a meme from the British Humanist Association, (amongst whom I am happy to be numbered), which celebrated the banning of the teaching of Creationism as a scientific theory in state funded schools.

John, in a rejoinder, commented that both Evolution and Creationism were good theories. Now let me be clear, Creationism is not a good scientific theory; it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory. Creationism fails to meet any of the criteria that are required of a scientific theory and worst of all it is a position most commonly employed on the extreme fringes of the British and American right wing. If you’ve encountered Britain First or The Tea Party movement you’ll know what I mean.

I described creationism as marsh gas. John quipped that my bottom was marsh gas. Employing the best of my native wit, (stop laughing), I responded that my bottom produces marsh gas due to the nature and evolution of my alimentary tract as indicated by Charles Darwin. So far so good. Some childish jokes, no harm done.

John then proposed his Prometheus Theory of Creationism and intimated that it should be considered equally alongside any other scientific theory.

Now creationism is ridiculous but perhaps I shouldn’t have gone where I went next. I told John, my oldest friend, that his opinion, and indeed my opinion didn’t matter. The only important thing that mattered was the facts and the theory that they supported. I said I didn’t give a shit what he believed as long as he didn’t try to get ignorance and foolishness taught in our schools. I outlined the factors that define a scientific theory. I suggested the opinion that religion and religious belief are inherently wrong, (they are but no matter) and a blight on human progress which we should discard in favour of something better.

John’s spluttering reply was prefaced by an ad hominem assault which described me as a tax wasting public servant posting during work hours while he, a hard-working self-employed man, was just trying to do his best. He went on to insist that a scientific theory was a only a form of hypothesis just like belief and therefore his belief in aliens interfering in human evolution was equally as valid as the theory of evolution by natural selection. John indicated that the authority of his PhD alone was reason enough for him to spout such garbage.

At which point things, as they say, went nuclear. I gave him a several thousand word intellectual slapping. I won’t bore you with the details but it was good stuff. I was on a roll. I was roaring like the intellectual colossus I often imagine I am, bestriding the discussion; lucid, clear and in command of the facts. My prose style was clean and my thinking clear. I had been insulted by someone in the middle of a debate, and I came back punching. Yeah baby, bring it on, I’m channelling the Hitch! I’m the fucking reincarnation of Bertram Russell, spouting Zola and Epicurus.

No.

That’s not what happened.

I made my oldest friend, the person with whom I have most in common, look like a fool. I dismissed his deeply held beliefs and humiliated him in a public forum.

What kind of colossal cock am I?

Here’s the thing. With all that is going on in the world, all the violence and misery brought about by our inability to reach across our respective paradigms, if two entirely similar people with just this one philosophical difference, can’t accept and even love the inherently ridiculous in each other, what hope is there for the rest of humanity? John and I are just two middle aged men with access to the Internet, but there are people out there with access to atom bombs and biological weapons.

I’m one friend down and that’s nothing to be proud off. And I’m a human being and right now that’s nothing to be proud of either.

We must find ways to accommodate each other and we must find ways to forgive and show mercy. If this sounds like a familiar trope then it is. We’ve been taught it all our lives, but we never act on this teaching.

John unfriended me and deleted most of his part of the discussion. I have deleted the rest of the post so as to hide his humiliation and my shame.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

-Alexander Pope