We need more awkward people
Posted on December 26 2024George Bernard Shaw once suggested all progress was dependent upon the existence of unreasonable – or awkward – people. St Stephen – the first Christian martyr – was definitely one of them. We need more of them to make the world a better place.
The syllogism doesn’t work, of course.
It is true that the awkward advance the world. It is not true that by being awkward you advance the world.
You could just be a dickhead.
The Sage of Ely is more Mr Whiteface than Bozo isn’t he?
Rather like the condition of being a genius. There are far more people who think they are, than actually are.
You could just be a dickhead.
e.g., G.B. Shaw himself.
An awkward and objectionable person speaks: We need more awkward people
Not in his comment section, does he? Only sheep allowed.
I wouldn’t hold George Bernard Shaw up as an exemplar of anything except being a totalitarian cunt.
And, the point about St Stephen was, he was a bit of an awkward character, if I’m completely honest with you. He didn’t buy the way that the Jewish authorities were running the church of which he was a member. He was pretty darned unhappy with them to be totally honest. And if you read what he had to say, he didn’t hold back.
Is this part of a Nativity play featuring Sooty?
and the point that I made yesterday when talking about Jesus is that he died for his economic convictions.
Ah, the famous Sermon on the MMT. God so loved the world, he sent his only son to advocate higher public spending, voting Labour, and no interest rates, according to Ritchie.
Do Quakers not bother excommunicating heretics?
Nauseating stuff and proof evil never sleeps unfortunately
And I’m not suggesting that anyone should ever die for their convictions because I sincerely hope that will always be unnecessary. But do need people who will live with the discomfort that being outside the mainstream brings.
Unless such people are ‘neoliberals’ or the ‘Far Right’ of course – then we need to talk about it and such people need to be opposed in totalis.
Because it is uncomfortable to be a critic.
Doesn’t seem to have done you any harm in 40 years as a parasite.
It is difficult to see your career blocked by those who don’t want to hear what you have to say.
I know he could have been a movie star, and indeed as already mentioned his self – directed Westerns ‘The Outlaw Richard Murphy’ and ‘Low Fens Grifter’ might get released now he has more time on his hands. This line sounds like Marlon Brando in ‘On the Waterfront’.
It is difficult to know that most of the world disagrees with you and would rather not hear until the moment when they realise that you were right all along.
Facing up to error is something all of us have to do. To not admit you are wrong, ever, at the age of 67 (?) is genuinely embarrassing.
Stephen never got to that point. He died before that opportunity arose, and as I’m saying, I hope that is not the case for today’s critics, but my point is we definitely need them.
To quote Thomas Carlyle, when it comes to Murphy ‘whosever is in such of ruin, let him follow that man, he or no one is on the road to it’
All change is dependent upon the existence of awkward people. Stephen was an awkward man, a man who would stand up and say, “I don’t agree with you however much you wish to persecute me.” If we are to have a better world, then we need some more awkward people.
Rubbish – most lasting change depends on carrying people with you, rather than ramming it through in the teeth of conspicuous dissent. Which is why Murphy is nearly always perpetually angry and frustrated. Most people treat him as though he is an obnoxious twat. That he takes such treatment as vindication speaks volumes.
Maybe Ritchie should join the Church of England. They’ll worship anything as long as it isn’t God or Jesus:
Priests have been told to edit popular carols this Christmas to avoid upsetting other religions.
The Church of England has been accused of ‘losing the plot’ after it urged clergy to alter Advent hymns so that congregations can celebrate the festive season ‘without causing unnecessary offence’.
Christian hymns such as O Come, O Come, Emmanuel have been singled out for depicting other faiths as being ‘outside of God’s grace’.
An email sent to clergy in the Birmingham diocese said: ‘Try to use language that won’t add further confusion or tension or take away anything from the good news of the Nativity.’
A vicar who shared the email with The Mail on Sunday said the Church has ‘really lost the plot’, adding that even Russian dictator Vladimir Putin‘ doesn’t order Orthodox churches to censor carols at Christmas’.
Also targeted was Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending, a favourite of Queen Victoria. Clergy have been sent a link to research that suggests the second verse contains ‘problematic words’ by stating Jesus is the ‘true Messiah’.
This is what happens when you stop warming heretics on pyres.
Steve
I’m fairly sure ‘Sooty’ would be unacceptable to the powers that be for it being used as an insult (albeit less frequently than terms such as ‘Coon’ or ‘Sambo’) to black people in the 1970s.
Second post speaks volumes about our church’s priorities. No issue with child molesters but concern over offending the ‘Religion of Peace’ – the vicar who made the point about Putin is spot on. He isn’t worse than Hitler or Stalin, or even in the same ball park. However our current government – the less said the better.
VP – it gets worse, if you can believe it:
But diocesan officials in the ‘presence and engagement team’ claim the hymns have a ‘strong emphasis of supersessionism’ – a doctrine which holds that Christianity is the one true religion.
So what is the “good news” these atheist arse bandits want to share with me? They have AIDS or something? Here’s hoping.
Re: Hitler, he had the same sort of religious opinions edgy 14 year olds do:
Christianity is the revenge of the wandering Jew. Where would we be today if only we had not had Christianity – we would have the same brains, but we would have avoided a hiatus of one-and-a-half thousand years…. The terrible thing is that millions of people believe, or act as though they believe, all this: they feign belief in it all. If we had all been Mohammedans, today the world would have been ours.
Ht David Irving, Hitler’s War (1991)
Hitler got his wish, but on a monkey’s paw. No refunds!
Some awkwardness makes people question accepted things, which is good.
Most awkwardness makes people forget to change their car’s oil, which is bad.
Do Quakers not bother excommunicating heretics?
They’ll ‘excommunicate’ anyone who believes in orthodox Christianity, Steve.
Quakers are heretics. Despite (or because of?) this, they can be very quick to ‘shun’ any of their flock they take a disliking to.
Theo, Chris – Quakers believed in the equality of men and women, and they believed that women had a right to preach.
Sounds like heresy to me. Exterminatus.
@Steve 3.40pm
It is a point of view. Gibbon puts the decline & fall of the Roman Empire down to the spread of Christian mysticism. And the Islamic civilisation owed much to the inheritance of Roman North Africa. So without Christianity the Western Roman Empire might have survived in some form or other up until today. So we wouldn’t have gone through that long twilight of decline & incapability. The Industrial Revolution could have come before the end of the first millennium. Although one would have to think of a reason why it would be necessary. But it’s hard to see Mohammedan mysticism as being much of an improvement on Christian mysticism. They both deny cause & effect. And it’s understanding cause & effect you need to get anywhere. The Romans seem to have.
The (verey long) list of things of which Murphy is ignorant includes the chapters in “The Acts of the Apostles” that refer to St Stephen.
Stephen was a loyal (fervently so) supporter of the Jewish authorities [Simeon Peter, James etc.) who were running the church of which he waas a member and he was chosen by them to be entrusted with managing the financial support of the widows. He was persecuted by Jewish authorities who did NOT belong to the church.
@ Steve
Quakers are hetretics *despite* not *because* they believe that men and women are equal.
BiS – Gibbon puts the decline & fall of the Roman Empire down to the spread of Christian mysticism.
Things were going great until Constantine came along.
So without Christianity the Western Roman Empire might have survived in some form or other up until today. So we wouldn’t have gone through that long twilight of decline & incapability. The Industrial Revolution could have come before the end of the first millennium.
This is not just wrong, it’s heroically wrong, in a “wet streets cause rain” sort of way. Kenneth Clark wept.
And it’s understanding cause & effect you need to get anywhere. The Romans seem to have.
One of the downsides of the decline of Classical education is that people get all sorts of funny ideas about the Romans. No, they weren’t 20th century rationalists in togas, they were extremely religious and superstitious people who had all manner of strange beliefs and customs including daily almost ubiquitous animal sacrifice to curry the favour of the gods while gazing into the bloody exta, looking for divine messages.
john77 – Quakers are hetretics *despite* not *because* they believe that men and women are equal.
Sez you. The Two Ronnies warned us about this stuff, in The Worm That Turned.
I thought that there was a university department in the Sheffield region specialising in the output of awkward people?
All people were superstitious at the time. Most people still are. The Romans were at least pragmatic. Monotheistic religions deny cause & effect. They attempt a theory of everything. We may be looking for that in physics but we’re not trying to live under the assumption we’ve found it.
Christianity’s a lot in common with communism. Nice theory. Shame about the 100 million murdered.
If you take a walk around Herculaneum and gaze into it for a bit you’ll realise that apart from flight, steam & ICE engines, electronics and modern medicine, the Romans had everything pretty well sewn up. That indicates to me a remarkable ability to study the world empirically and determine cause and effect rather than ascribe everything to acts of gods.
Not that I’ve paid much attention to Roman culture but it strikes me their gods were an entertaining set of petty, squabbling fuckers who had little empirical effect on the world but nonetheless had to be paid allegiance to.
Religion, eh?
Until recently I’d always been perplexed by obviously rational, logical people – Nobel science prize winners, for example – who were nonetheless deeply religious. I’d lazily adopted the progressive, bien pensant view that religious people were simply irrational and silly. It then dawned on me that of course religion is all about meaning; that science and rationality tell us all about the what of things but very little about the why.
I’m now of the view that religiosity – the need for meaning – is simply an innate human characteristic, largely immutable, probably having a normal distribution throughout humanity. Some empiricist individuals like me are well on the left of the curve, able to exist equably with little need for meaning so long as we are able to understand a bit about how things work. Others are the opposite. Most are in the middle.
I think religiosity is essentially a second world view, parallel to but unconnected with rationality, very closely allied to emotion, intuition and creativity. If this is true, superstition and religion are with us forever so we may as well get used to it. This includes the fatuous, godless religions otherwise known as ideologies. We will always have ‘political economists’.
A great advantage of the god religions is that (as we saw with the Ten Commandments discussion) they can create simple, comprehensible and permanent rules for living and a predictable social structure within which to live. Furthermore by placing gods above men they’re a useful antidote to human solipsism, and they offer the deferred gratification of an escape into an afterlife free of scarcity if you’re prepared to stay the course and endure the earthly shit.
One can see the appeal. The Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea aspect of their competition with each other is a bit of a drawback, though. Splitters.
@Norman
If we have a religion in this house, it’s Candoble. It’s a syncretic religion out of Africa hiding behind Catholicism to avoid suppression. It’s polytheist. The various orixas being responsible for various aspects of the world. What’s good about it is they’re not remote. You can do deals with them. It’s expected. My own personal orixa is Exu. He shares a lot of the characteristics of the Nordic Loki & is a bit of an outsider. I can live with that. Candoble really teaches you don’t get nothing for nothing. You don’t sit around praying for things, you get things done. And you don’t have to believe in anything in particular. Whatever suits you. It doesn’t pretend to have created the universe or even be compulsory.
Norman,
Yes, the Roman Empire circa 70AD was a very advanced place in many respects. Aqueducts, concrete, engineering etc. However, it had not advanced at all from 70BC, and didn’t advance any further technologically until its fall, even during the long periods of peace and prosperity that should in theory have permitted innovation to flourish. If the Roman Empire was a Civilization computer game, they would have reached the moon by around 400AD and been officially declared the winner.
even during the long periods of peace and prosperity that should in theory have permitted innovation to flourish
But innovation doesn’t flourish in periods of peace & prosperity. If you’ve got peace & prosperity, where’s the need to innovate?
BiS – The Romans were at least pragmatic. Monotheistic religions deny cause & effect
There is no anthropological evidence to support this, and plenty to suggest the exact opposite (science flourished in monotheist Christian societies and less so in polytheist cultures such as India).
It twere the Christians who built universities, invented printing, discovered a theory of gravity, and invented modern science. Ancient Rome was a relatively advanced agrarian culture based on slavery. If it had lasted into the 21st century somehow it probably still wouldn’t have achieved an industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution wasn’t an inevitability, but the unique confluence of specific circumstances, individuals and institutions.
Norman – I’m now of the view that religiosity – the need for meaning – is simply an innate human characteristic, largely immutable, probably having a normal distribution throughout humanity. Some empiricist individuals like me are well on the left of the curve, able to exist equably with little need for meaning so long as we are able to understand a bit about how things work. Others are the opposite. Most are in the middle.
The supernatural has always been an integral part of the human experience throughout history.
I agree with Fox Mulder.
Squawkbox – However, it had not advanced at all from 70BC, and didn’t advance any further technologically until its fall, even during the long periods of peace and prosperity that should in theory have permitted innovation to flourish.
That’s the thingymagigy. There’s this theory that “innovation” and “progress” are inevitable, when for 99.99% of human history that was never the case, because the conditions of their society precluded it.
Like the Romans. They maxxed out a particular tech tree (Iron Age land thieves), which could have comfortably endured forever if it wasn’t for immigration and its consequences.
We are, according to Charles Darwin, apes with short memories. He was a Shropshire lad, so he should know. This “modern civilisation” thing isn’t too big to fail, it’s a historical aberration. We are a social species, but for most of our history that meant “hiding behind your barricaded door with a knife at night”.
Yes, the benefits of civilisation (indoor plumbing, the ability of the planet to feed 10 billion and more people, not tripping over pyramids of human skulls, digital watches) are unquestionable. But the things that make it all possible are not unfuckupable. Look at South Africa, in one short human lifetime they have gone from being a nuclear power to not being able to keep the lights on.
We are the FAFO generation.
Steve: The supernatural has always been an integral part of the human experience throughout history.
Sure, but as I understand it Progressive rationalists thought that this was a result of simple ignorance which could be educated away. The exmple of highly educated rational types who are also deeply religious disproves this. Funny how Progressives never noticed. Hence my theory of religiosity.
I rather like Taoism. Mainly because it doesn’t go around telling everyone what to do, or else. As far as I know there aren’t any Taoist extremists threatening people with violence if they don’t start meditating, or cultivating inner peace.
Norm – Progressive rationalists thought that this was a result of simple ignorance which could be educated away.
Yarp, materialism has always been a midwit favourite. Life would be simpler and less scary if we could explain away everything, so just ridicule, dismiss or be wilfully ignorant of other people’s testimony to the contrary. And like Pauline Kael, everyone they know tends to be similar. I’ve been that arrogant myself.
But materialism is dumb even on a basic scientific level. There’s a reason cosmologists go mad, contemplating Infinity is not something the human brain is equipped to do in our Neandethal Onslow skulls.
But if I understand the materialist position, 13 and a half billion years ago or so, the entire universe, all matter and energy, even time and space itself, suddenly flowered into existence out of nothing and for no reason. An almighty, cosmic exgurgitation of Everything, all that is seen and unseen, in just exactly the right quantities and energy states to instantly annihilate approx 99% of all possible matter and – as improbably as a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias in outer space – lead to one of the amazingly improbable scenarios – out of billions of bad options – where the balance of energy and matter and the laws of physics permit life as we know to be possible in the universe. Every Effect in the Universe is without an ultimate Cause, in other words.
I can think of no baser superstition than this.
Jim – That is why they fail. In the good old days, adultery was frowned upon to the extent the local parishioners would strip you naked and chase you around the local church with birches to thrash the sin out of your pink and angry buttocks. (Despite what feminists falsely claim, the medieval authorities were not picky about whether they punished men or women)
Say what you like about medieval family courts, but they had an admirably low divorce rate. I’d have avoided office parties if I lived in them days.
Whereas the Taoists just have their Hai Karate aftershave and Sweet and Sour Chicken Balls please.
PS – by “on a scientific level”, I mean if you can’t rely on your desk not to ultimately consist of a buzzing cloud of quantum probability states, doing a mad angry dance on the edge of existence, for the next trillion, babillion, megagazillion years, until proton decay causes your desk, you, and everything to go – poof! – and fizzle out into nothing, in a dark and empty void that lasts forever – then what good is IKEA extended warranty?
– But if I understand the materialist position, 13 and a half billion years ago or so, the entire universe, all matter and energy, even time and space itself, suddenly flowered into existence out of nothing and for no reason. An almighty, cosmic exgurgitation of Everything, all that is seen and unseen, in just exactly the right quantities and energy states to instantly annihilate approx 99% of all possible matter and – as improbably as a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias in outer space – lead to one of the amazingly improbable scenarios – out of billions of bad options – where the balance of energy and matter and the laws of physics permit life as we know to be possible in the universe. Every Effect in the Universe is without an ultimate Cause, in other words.
Being Douglas Adams aware, you should also know of his analogy of the puddle being convinced its implausibly perfectly shaped hole in the ground must have been made for it. If the number of opportunities for intelligent life to exist is greater than the unlikeliness of it occurring then its appearance at least once is probably inevitable. The numbers each way might be uncountably vast but zeroes can be culled and the equation reduced to one showing life emerging.
And, of course, you do misunderstand the “materialist” position. It doesn’t state that the entire universe came into being out of nothing and for no reason. It shows that with our current tools of understanding we* can make testable ideas on what happened back to where our tools of understanding no longer work – a point we call a singularity (a fancy term for the maths going tilt). In other words, the “materialist” position is incomplete on how and has nothing to say on why.
*When I say “we” I mean they. Only a tiny portion of intelligent life is intelligent enough for that maths.
Douglas Adams’s (pbuh) puddle analogy is a great one to explain the weak anthropic principle, that life is found only where there are suitable conditions for it to exist. It doesn’t really help with the strong anthropic principle of why the laws of the universe appear to be fine-tuned to allow complex life to form.
One way round this problem is to extend Everett’s “Many Worlds Interpretation” of QM to not just “everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics actually happens” but that every possible set of physical laws exists ‘somewhere’ and therefore it should be no surprise that we find ourselves in a universe where the laws favour our own existence.
Personally, I remain unconvinced by such hand-waving. I’m with Jim, in that I consider myself the most thorough-going Taoist that you’ll meet in a day’s march.