Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (19 page)

When you look at what human activity is doing to the planet and to human societies, it’s almost possible to see the modern rational ego as a kind of cancer. Our ability to marvel at the sleek design of an iPhone is in direct proportion to our tendency to shut ourselves off from the systematic assault on the natural world that is involved in its manufacture. The modern, rational ego is greedy and exploitative. Its technologies are destroying the planet. It cuts us off from nature and from each other.

Look under the surface of a new atheist and you’ll probably find someone who believes in the ultimate reality of the physical world. In fact, most of us probably have this belief nowadays, or if we don’t we’ll keep quiet about it when we’re at work or somewhere like that, so as not to appear flaky. Nature is at its heart nothing more mysterious than the interaction of atomic particles governed by natural forces such as electromagnetism, or so the materialist story goes. It will eventually be revealed that everything from a beaver’s choice of habitat to the quizzical slant of Richard Dawkins’s left eyebrow is explicable in terms of physics and chemistry.

One of the areas in which this materialist slant is being called into question quite publicly is mental illness. At the time of writing, prominent academics in the world of clinical psychology were urging their colleagues to abandon the tendency to see mental-health problems as having primarily biological causes, to see patients as meaningless bundles of cells governed by the laws of chemistry. Instead, they seemed to be saying, a greater premium should be placed on understanding people’s personal stories, what has happened to them, and so on.

For all that Dawkins
et al
. undermine religion because of the difficulties in establishing its literal truth, the fact is that until three hundred years or so ago nobody valued religious writings for their literal truth, but for their power as myth. Myths have a certain quality of timelessness, of being about things that didn’t necessarily happen in
AD
33 or whenever, but which have always been happening – and are still happening. Whether you can be bothered with them or not isn’t really the point. Myths seem to have sustained people through the strangeness and difficulties of life over several millennia. And they’ve obviously worked for some, as many of these stories remain with us.

The literal interpretation of things also tends to discount the weirder end of human experience. And fair enough – the people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs or to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in a bowl of Rice Krispies might well be nuts. But what about the experiences of visionaries and poets?

A scientific rationalist would probably see a visionary like William Blake as simply crazy. He would attempt to take his visions literally, and so scorn them as delusional. Modern culture, with its science-influenced assumptions about the nature of things, keeps us locked into a world-view where the things we experience are considered to be either subjective or objective. In other words, they’re either ‘all in your head’ or ‘all out there in the so-called “real world”’. But philosophers and psychologists acknowledge that our perceptions involve a combination of both. There’s a mystical quality to the way we see the world. We don’t simply see it as it is, but by means of a sensory and conceptual apparatus conditioned by the cultural context of our upbringing and life so far. And so
all
perception is really a collaboration between what’s ‘out there’ and what’s ‘in here’.

Blake’s vision of the sun as a company of angels was clearly as much created as perceived. We assume our science-informed view of the sun as a nuclear furnace is more accurate and useful. Blake, on the other hand, would probably have viewed this literalistic interpretation of things as soulless and just as mad in a different way.

Built into the secular world-view seems to be a belief in the idea of progress, that science is allowing us to build a better world, and that utopia lies ahead (especially if we can get rid of all these religious, irrational types holding things back). Philosopher John Gray sees in this salvation-through-scientific-progress faith an echo of Christianity, and the idea that human life can be made cumulatively better until we arrive at something akin to perfection. The idea of salvation as a historical event doesn’t hold up in the face of reality, he says, explaining that improvements in human life are not cumulative in the same way that scientific advances are. Throughout history these kinds of apocalyptic faiths have tended to flounder, often leaving a huge amount of destruction in their wake. Most recently, the belief that globalisation and free-market capitalism constituted the end of history and the final triumph of Western liberal democracy looks to have been woefully over-optimistic, and is implicated in Bush and Blair’s ill-fated Iraq adventure.

The idea of progress also relies on our belief in the idea of linear time, something that could itself be considered a kind of modern-day myth, an idea explored in fiction by writers such as J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs. We tend to view our lives as progressing from the past into the future like a kind of scenic railway. But this is nothing more than an idea, a construct of our imaginations. We view the present moment as something that’s developed out of what’s happened in the past and which derives its meaning from what we think it will lead to in the future. But this is a process that’s all in our heads. For one thing, at the subatomic level, physicists have long abandoned assumptions of causality and of a linear time flowing from point A to point B.

Maybe our hopes for the future could be invested in a return to a more mythic and magical – and less literal – view of reality. While the rational, scientific mind has made huge strides in terms of our mastery of the physical world, there’s room to question whether its fruits truly constitute ‘progress’ when you look at the problems it also seems to be helping to create: the destruction of the ecosystem, and the epidemic of depression and discouragement that seems to be taking hold throughout the Western world.

• • •

Several candidates have been put forward as the world’s seven billionth person. Of course, the figure seven billion is just human beings and doesn’t include the army that China has cloned from Jango Fett. It’s amazing that seven billion people have been born and yet there’s not one who’s a delivery man willing to say what time he’s going to come to your house.

One of the world’s leading geneticists is looking for a female volunteer to give birth to a Neanderthal baby. I’m not sure what he’ll end up creating, other than a cracking football team. After growing the Neanderthal embryo in a lab it will then be implanted into the volunteer’s womb. I think that when it comes to volunteering most women would rather do a week in a Sue Ryder shop.

There were calls for a law that would enable children to be told if they were conceived by sperm donation. It’s only fair to mention I’m the result of sperm from an anonymous donor. My mother can’t reveal his identity – all she knows for sure is that it said VW on the key ring.

IVF babies could soon be created using DNA from three people, a process pioneered not just in the lab, but in lay-bys around the country. Critics say it’ll demean the process of human reproduction. Having caught myself in the mirror during sex I can’t imagine that’s actually possible. To put it bluntly, I look like a beached manatee that’s been fitted with a misfiring pacemaker.

Two men in the United States with HIV have been cured by a bone-marrow transplant. I’ve known for a long time that bone marrow’s the key to eradicating the disease; my dogs have been eating it for years and none of them have at any point shown any symptoms of AIDS. If this proves anything it’s that scraping the marrow from a healthy person and then injecting it into your own bones in an expensive, complex and life-threatening operation does seem a fair-enough price to pay to get a bareback ride off a stranger.

Scientists have used sheep cells and a 3D printer to create a human ear. Think of the potential. Have them grafted on all over your body and you could be the ultimate glasses stand in a Vision Express. People might think you look stupid bedecked with ears, but I bet they wouldn’t risk bitching about you. Well, not within a hundred yards.

Scientists claim that Viagra could help men lose weight. I suppose it does make it much harder for them to get near the dinner table. For women it has the opposite effect, as men taking Viagra are no longer that bothered about what they look like. Viagra is currently used by some obese men – to help them locate the tip when they need a wee. I can see how Viagra might help you lose weight; you really do want to spend as little time as possible in a sweetie shop with a raging boner.

Scientists say that looking at Page 3 girls can speed up your mental reactions. It certainly does whenever your partner comes into the room. What this study shows us is that scientists, if given enough time and resources, will always find a way to look at naked women.

Scientists have also been trying to discover the evolutionary advantages of our fingertips becoming wrinkled when wet. I thought it would be obvious – to be a better lover. I know I always submerge my hands in a bowl of warm water for at least two hours before foreplay so my fingers become ribbed for her pleasure.

If I don’t have two hours spare and need to initiate foreplay in an emergency situation a passable subterfuge is to skewer a dried apricot on to each finger. This also comes in useful if you don’t want your fingerprints to be left on the body. Her body. Her living, breathing body. At least, it was when I left her apartment, Your Honour. In addition, the apricots can be a useful source of sustenance should you become victim to a countrywide manhunt.

Experts predict that in five million years men will be extinct. I don’t think men will ever go extinct. Creatures become extinct because they fail to breed. Even the last man on earth would find a way to fuck himself. Human sperm could be grown in a lab to counter falling male fertility, which is partly due to female oestrogenic contraceptives finding their way into the water supply. I’ve been doing what I can to redress the balance by going round wanking into reservoirs.

Meanwhile, the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, has warned that humanity could wipe itself out by 2100. That’s a bit pessimistic. I’m going for 2050. The United Nations reckons that global food shortages mean we need to start eating insects. Of course, there are pros and cons. Yes, there’s not much meat on a centipede, but at least you know everyone’s going to get a leg. I’ve been devising a snack bar that actually uses maggots as a tasty, nutritious filling. It resembles a Bounty when cut, hence my slogan – ‘A Taste of Parasites’. I tried an insect diet. I had some caterpillars, and a month or so later the prospect of eating more insects filled me with a mix of excitement and nervous anticipation that there is sadly no expression for.

A Dutch lab has created beef from stem cells. It sounds frivolous, but making burgers like this might be the only way to get most American voters to ever accept stem-cell research. The researchers produced a mince-like substance, although by all accounts it takes just a simple tweak to make sausages, by swapping the beaker for a test tube. It’s highly significant news for the UK, as by 2020 the demand for talent-show contestants is predicted to be so high it’ll be impossible to generate enough naturally.

Stem cells could cure cancer, diabetes, autism and Alzheimer’s. I like the attitude of any scientist who thinks, ‘Fuck that. Get those stem cells in a bun and find me a pickle.’ A hundred years from now scientists will come up with a solution to the problems of producing beef in a laboratory when someone discovers that dead cow meat makes an almost convincing substitute.

A man has been given a face transplant and regained his sense of smell. Which isn’t the best time for that to return, considering all he can smell is the smoky barbecue wafts of a dead man’s flesh that’s been soldered on to his own skull. Another guy had the world’s first successful hand transplant. A hand transplant! Imagine that. It would always feel like someone else was doing it – a dead man. If he wanks someone else off he’ll technically just be watching.

A woman has had a £10,000 prosthetic tail made so she can work as a full-time mermaid. And people say there are no jobs out there. Even better was the story of the guy who had his injured penis rebuilt out of the tissue from his arm. They managed to make it look just like a real penis, apart from the tattoo reading ‘MUM’. If you had an arm and hand for a penis, at the moment of climax you could high five her uterus. It would be pretty romantic if you could use your own wedding ring as a cock ring. A hand penis would come in so useful. But I’d probably end up on a register after using it to hold my pint when playing pool.

• • •

Iran successfully sent a monkey into space – and it returned safely. It’s amazing, isn’t it? In Iran they won’t let women drive with a non-relative yet they’re happy for a monkey to pilot a spaceship. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t send a woman up first and when she survived considered it safe enough to risk a monkey. The monkey’s fine and has shown no side-effects from flying into space – or at least that’s what he said on his Twitter site. Iran now hopes to be able to send a monkey to the moon by 2025.

The latest Mars Exploration rover,
Curiosity
, arrived safely on the red planet. Well, it beamed back a black and white photo of some gravel, so that’s all the proof I need. They say the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe has used unprecedented technology – greater even than that used to pretend they landed on the moon. It’d be ironic if they did discover life on Mars squashed underneath the tyres of one of the rovers.

It’s not like the pioneering days of space. It’s hard to get excited when you know there isn’t a bewildered monkey up there staring out at the stars thinking, ‘The monkey God must be angry with me.’ After all, there are a dozen metal tubes still in orbit with skeletal canine jaws clamped shut on a long-dry perished rubber feeding teat. It seems unfair they never brought them back. But, alas, it happened long before the days of the retractable lead.