The pro- and anti-divorce debates that are colouring our lives today have certainly brought out the best and the worst in us. Both sides have their extremists hurling invective peppered with fire and brimstone that causes me to shudder at the thought that, despite our veneer of liberal civilisation, when push comes to shove we become as unreasonably intolerant and fanatical as the protagonists of the religious wars that tore France into shreds in the 16th century.
We have ministers writing voluminously verbose encyclicals, lawyers accusing people of diabolically distorting biblical quotations and misquoting prelates, plus a host of online “commenters” headed by the indefatigable Joe Zammit from Paola whose statements, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, tear through people’s sensibilities and feelings with their insensitivity. If these people are under the impression that the Good Lord is observing their antics with approval, their Good Lord must be very different to mine. As I have said before, most of these people who spout doctrine without love and without compassion are not the type of people I would, when the time came, care to share my cloud, my harp or my Lavazza coffee with for eternity and nor would you.
In fact, the whole issue is now boring me no end as all those who, like me, have no vested interest in the divorce issue but who urge compromise and moderation to settle a purely civil issue with the least possible fuss, have been bulldozed or ignored. I thought of this late last night as I surfed through this glorious website recently put up by Google called Art Project wherein one can virtually visit a number of top museums like the MoMA, the Uffizi or the Rijksmuseum and examine a selection of their top treasures as if in situ. At the same time, I was listening to Bartok’s infinitely emotional second Violin Concerto.
Here I am, unmarried and not very likely to, getting my knickers in a right royal twist about something that, in the long and even the short run, will make no difference to my life at all when all I have to do to find what could almost be termed as Nirvana is to attach myself to my “machine”. What bliss, I thought; whereupon I remembered this horrible short story by E.M. Forster called The Machine Stops which, since it was written in 1909, we can now safely term as uncannily and very uncomfortably prophetic.
It is this “machine” that has changed the world. It is these machines that enable people like myself to learn from others, to know what they think and why and let others know of my own opinions. The social networks have changed society as they cut through generational differences and educational and class ones too, creating a wonderfully eclectic mix, which, all the while, is changing our outlook and our thought processes so radically, yet, as Mary Poppins maintained, with that spoonful of sugar…
Egypt is a case in point. In the land of the pharaohs there is a great and frightening strife. Whereas in the very recent past riots like the ones taking place in Tahrir Square would have been a footnote in World News because dictators like Hosni Mubarak could, in the past, clamp down on the few existing modes of telecommunication, today it is virtually impossible and pictures and stories of what is going on in Cairo are being exchanged and transmitted from Honolulu to Easter Island and from Reykjavik to Terra del Fuego on PCs, iPhones, Blackberries and anything else that makes mass and instant communication possible in our weird and wonderful 21st century; a century which, despite the enthusiasm and optimism with which it was greeted, was marked indelibly in year one with one of the greatest atrocities in human history, one which has and will have for a very long time tragically far-reaching consequences. The light at the end of the tunnel has not appeared yet and I doubt whether it will in my lifetime.
Our “machine” offers us the option of either becoming part of a colossal movement that is able to change global thinking with websites like Avaaz, for instance, where I have just signed the petition showing solidarity with the Egyptian liberal protesters, or shutting myself away from reality by watching and listening to Gideon Kremer and Gil Shaham perform the two Bartok Concertos on YouTube and examining the Cézannes at the MoMA to my heart’s content without giving a toss about anyone else.
It is so much more rewarding than trying to explain that civil marriage and Christian marriage are two distinct species and that nobody is remotely trying to erode the latter by promoting the former. The fact they are inextricably entwined in people’s minds is utterly exhausting.
Yet, although the “machine” can be used as a vehicle to escape, it is also the vehicle in which one can, if one chooses to, keep in touch with the world with all its wonders and woes. So what happens if, as Forster predicted, “the machine stops”? The consequences will be cataclysmic, far more so than Forster was able to predict in 1909 for we are far too dependent on our machine than even he could have ever imagined.