Outside World

Neville Goodman

It's 4 years since it last happened in this column, but the outside world has intruded into my insular medical thoughts. First — and let me get this straight: the leader of a major world religion that, in its time, has murdered thousands of people in the name of its god, quotes from a hundreds-of-years-dead chap who accused another religion of using violence. You might think the sensible approach to this would be to shrug shoulders, and say, ‘Look who's talking!’ But no. In a clear demonstration that human beings don't deserve the Earth that they are presently threatening with death by fire, there are riots and a nun is shot dead. Not long afterwards, a Berlin production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo is pulled because one scene includes the lopped-off head of Mohammed. The same treatment is meted out to Jesus, Buddha, and Poseidon, but you can be sure that the Opera House was not worried about being besieged by mermaids. There is no place for gratuitous insults, but we cannot allow the world to be cowed by imagined slights. There is no saying more abused than, “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones…” All too often, words bring on the sticks and stones. It's not so much that the pen is mightier than the sword, but that the pen is the pre-runner to the sword.

Richard Dawkins, having taken many side-swipes at religion, has tackled it full on in his latest book, The God Delusion. I agree with almost everything Dawkins has ever written, but I'm not hopeful that the death of all religions would make the human condition any better. We'd just find other reasons to kill one another.

Rather more parochial, but no more encouraging, is the revelation that in the last year leading Chief Executives in the UK were awarded pay increases of 28%, over ten times the rate of inflation and twice the rise in share prices, while their workers received 3.7%. This follows the rule that to get more work out of people who are already rich you pay them much more, but to get more out of people who are poor you pay them even less. Except that I'm not sure the rich work any harder, and anyway they can always take a large pension and move onto the next job. The absolutely top dog CE received nearly £15 million, a cool 550 times more than his company's average salary. It's not the money; it's the message. No good will come of it.