Idolism (8 page)

One day when we were eight or so, Julian was sitting in the school playground reading
The Anti-Christ
by Nietzsche. While the other kids were horsing around in the playground, I was sitting next to Julian, making sure that nobody would disturb him. The supervising teacher strolled past us an estimated twelve times, daring to move in a little closer each time, until he finally stopped in front of us and asked us if we wouldn’t rather join the other kids and play.

Without looking up from his book Julian shook his head. “I’m reading Nietzsche.”

The teacher looked at me. “And what about you?”

“I’m watching over him,” I said.

The teacher shrugged, bit his sandwich, and strolled on.

Now Julian raised his head and looked at the teacher as he was strolling away. Julian seemed hurt, surprised that his reading choice didn’t provoke any kind of reaction from the teacher. No praise, no admiration, no acknowledgement of a mind that seemed to be way past its biological age. In hindsight I think he felt like a heavily wounded soldier on the battlefield who was overlooked by the medics because he was too proud to moan in pain.

That teacher’s failure to recognize the exceptionality of an eight-year-old sitting in the school playground and reading Nietzsche was the epitome of an education system that was bound to fail Julian. The system wasn’t made for people like Julian, which is why he hated it. Moreover, the system wasn’t made by people like Julian, which is why he hated it even more. He needed to live in his own world, a world custom made for his needs. And because of his various physical and mental issues they were very special needs.

When we were ten, Julian sang a song to me for the first time. I started tapping the rhythm with a pencil on my desk, and that’s basically how our band started. Julian was born to sing. He had an extraordinary voice, very strong yet very soft at the same time. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not as artistically gifted as Julian; I only have a sense of rhythm. I can only feel the pulse of life, but Julian hears its melody.

We made music just for fun really. At first it was only Julian and I; later Tummy and Ginger joined us. We didn’t have any great ambitions, and we didn’t really know how to write songs. That’s why one day Julian came up with the idea to cover copyright-free classics—Mozart, Beethoven, Christmas songs, church music, that kind of thing—and re-arrange them in a progressive rock style with elements of grunge and punk rock thrown in for good measure. The rock version of the Marseillaise with Julian’s breaking voice made you want to storm the Bastille even if you were 230 years late. Julian’s voice broke rather late because he had this condition. Something with his hormone glands, I keep forgetting the name. He didn’t have enough testosterone, so they gave him these testosterone pills to trigger his puberty. But by the time the doctors had found out what was wrong with him, he’d already been two or three years behind in his physical development. Now he was 17 but he still sounded like 15, and despite being rather tall and lanky he barely looked 13. Maybe that’s why he came up with the name of our band, Puerity. It’s supposed to be a cross between purity and puerility. Julian was a child at heart, and he was a child physically. But he was a child with the mind of a university professor.

MINDY was really just one of Julian’s weird ideas that started running amok in my head one day. It was during that phase when he was 15 or so and became obsessed with the theory of evolution. He would stand in front of that tree-of-life poster in my room and ask me a million questions about evolution, so I gave him a bunch of Richard Dawkins books just to shut him up. Julian devoured those books, and he became an instant Richard Dawkins fanboy. In the following weeks he didn’t only read all of Dakwins’ books but he also looked him up on YouTube and watched dozens upon dozens of videos in which Professor Dawkins talked not only about evolution but also—and especially—about atheism.

One night I called him on the phone, and he said I had just interrupted his prayers.

“Your what?” I asked.

“I was just praying.”

“Since when do you pray?”

“I don’t know, a while ago. Every night before I go to bed I get on my knees and pray to Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, Vishnu and a couple of others to thank them for Richard Dawkins.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or silly. One of the main reasons why he became such a polarizing figure in later years when he turned into that global media phenomenon was because every so often when he said something that was meant to be funny, people took him seriously, and whenever he was being blunt but serious, some people thought he was being sarcastic. I think he was deliberately trying to be that ambiguous. He enjoyed seeing the puzzled looks on people’s faces when they were trying to figure out whether he was being funny or serious.

He once said to us, “Imagine you were talking to someone about something that really matters to you, and all they did was to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘yeah, whatever’. I’d much rather confuse them, surprise them, catch them off guard. Sometimes I can see it in their eyes. Sometimes I can see how a brain that has been dormant for years suddenly wakes up and starts working again. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“Yeah, wha’ever, Jules,” Tummy said.

Julian just stared at him. He didn’t get the joke.

So anyway, one day we were hanging out at my place, and Julian told us about his hypothesis of the Global Teenager.

“Have you guys ever noticed how, with regard to developmental stages, ontogeny seems to recapitulate phylogeny?”

“English, please,” Tummy said and licked his fingers. He was eating crisps.

“That
was
English,” Ginger said. “If you had paid attention in science class, you’d know.”

“Well excuse me, Mary Curry, why don’t you tell me the difference between oncology and philology then, if you’re so smart?”

Ginger rolled her eyes. “First of all, it’s Marie Curie, not Mary Curry. Second, oncology is the study of tumours; philology is the science of language. Not that this has anything to do with what Julian was asking.”

“Phylogeny,” Julian said, “is the evolutionary development of a species. Ontogeny is the development of an individual. Your physical development over your lifetime mirrors that of the human species; or rather that of life on Earth over four billion years.”

“Cool story, bro,” Tummy said and shovelled more crisps into his mouth.

“Just think about it. Your life, as hard as that may be to imagine looking at you right now, Tummy, started as a single cell in your mother’s womb. Life on Earth started as single-celled organisms in the Earth’s womb, the ocean. In your mother’s womb that single cell started dividing and growing your body. In the ocean life developed into multi-celled organisms and multiplied. Did you know that as an embryo you had gill slits like a fish? They never developed into proper gills, and you couldn’t breathe through them, because you’re not a fish. But you had them because the common ancestor of you and today’s fish had them.”

“Not to mention the webbing,” Ginger added.

Julian nodded. “That’s right. You also had webbing between your fingers and your toes, making them almost look like the fins of a fish.”

Tummy frowned at his greasy fingers.

“Anyway,” Julian continued, “after about three billion years and nine months, life was ready to leave the womb. The first animals that left the ocean were still pretty helpless, just like you were when you were born. At first they were barely able to wriggle across the floor, just like you, but they soon learned to walk on four legs just like you learned to crawl on your hands and knees. And then, after a long time, you learned to walk upright on two legs just like our ancestors in Africa did five or six million years ago.”

“Hold on,” Tummy protested, “you left out the best bit, the one where I was a dinosaur!”

“That’s because you’re not a reptile,” I said, and Ginger added, “Or a bird. You’re a mammal.”

Tummy glanced at the tree-of-life poster on my wall. “Oh well.”

“At around the same time when you learned to walk,” Julian went on, “you also learned to talk, just like our ancestors developed bipedalism and language at roughly the same time. Then, about 5,000 years ago, we invented written language, and kids today learn how to read and write when they’re five or six years old. As you enter school, you realize that there are a lot more of your kind than you ever would have thought. Suddenly you meet complete strangers and you interact with them and play with them and learn from them. The historical equivalent of that would be the establishment of trade routes between Asia and Europe in the early Bronze Age. Tummy, do you remember that day in primary school in the first year when Phil Dixon and his bullies were beating you up, and then Michael and I stepped in and put Phil Dixon’s head down the toilet bowl?”

“How could I ever forget,” Tummy said with a big, bright smile on his face. “That was bloody brilliant!”

“That was the equivalent of the earliest wars between Bronze Age city states.”

“No kidding, huh?” Tummy said.

“And it doesn’t end there. As you were going to school to learn how to read and write and calculate, mankind made all sorts of discoveries and learned all these things about nature and the world and life, the universe, and everything, and slowly but surely our perception changed. In our childhood we perceived ourselves as the centre of the universe. Then we realized that we aren’t even the centre of the solar system, and that apart from the moon nothing really revolves around us. We’re but a tiny speck of dust in a universe that is vast and possibly endless. Coming to terms with that is an important part of growing up, and we’ve only just started to realize it because we’ve just hit puberty.”

Julian made a pause for dramatic effect. He looked at each of us with that childlike glow in his eyes that he always had when he was excited about something. He was obviously dying for some kind of reaction from his audience, so I delivered him from his ordeal.

“Oh please, do explain.”

“Well, look at it,” he said. “The most striking feature at the onset of puberty is the growth spurt. You grow a lot in a relatively short amount of time. Case in point, a hundred years ago there were two billion people in the world. Now they are seven billion.”

Tummy giggled. “So what about pubic hair? Are we trimming the Earth’s pubic hair when we chop down the rain forest?”

“Uh, no, Tummy. In humans, pubic hair is just an external sign of sexual maturity, of being able to reproduce. If you need a global equivalent for pubic hair, think rockets, satellites and space telescopes. As a species we’re slowly beginning to look beyond our home planet. We’re planning permanent outposts on the moon or on Mars, and we’re proactively looking for habitable worlds outside our solar system. We’re still a long way away from actually multiplying across the galaxy, but that’s perfectly normal. Just because you’re sexually mature doesn’t mean you spawn offspring right away. Most people wait ten or twenty years or even longer before they have children. Some never have children at all. As humans we’re only at the beginning of our adolescence. It will take us hundreds if not thousands of years to populate space, but we’re slowly beginning to get physically and mentally ready for it.”

Once again Julian made a pause and looked at us. We didn’t know what to say. What Julian said seemed to make sense, like it always did, and none of us knew enough about the topic to challenge him on the validity of his hypothesis. More importantly, though, I think we all experienced a profound feeling of
who-gives-a-shit
. We were just a bunch of teenagers, and teenagers usually have only a very limited interest in what happened a million years ago or what will happen a thousand years into the future. Teenagers are mostly obsessed with themselves, and with trivial things like their appearance. But Julian hadn’t finished yet, and he seemed to be reading my thoughts.

“But something else happens during puberty. Up here.” He pointed to his head. “As the adolescent brain matures, your perception of everything changes. One of the most obvious changes is your attitude towards your own body. Prepubescent children usually couldn’t care less about the clothes they’re wearing, or whether or not they have a bad hair day. During puberty, however, we suddenly become obsessed with our bodies and the way we look. It wasn’t until the ecology movement in the middle of the 20th century that mankind started to worry about the environment and about what we’ve been doing to our planet; and to ourselves, for that matter. Other social movements like the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and others, all share that common notion of self reflection. We suddenly started to think about what the hell we were doing.

“Since then we’ve slowly come to realize that we need to take better care of ourselves if we want to survive. Think of it as one great big single organism. The Earth is its body. Mankind is its brain.”

Even if I didn’t realize it right away, I think that was the moment Julian won me over; when he said the Earth was the body and mankind was the brain. It was an intriguing concept. In the last couple of months I had been reading various books and articles about Artificial Intelligence, and I had been writing several small AI programs. Some of them were pretty good at simulating AI. However, I didn’t want a simulation. I wanted the real thing.

“So what about intelligence?” I asked. “And more importantly: consciousness.”