I was introduced to the multi-talented Nick Cave through the series Peaky Blinders. The intro song which he wrote/performed is, "Red Right Hand" which is raw and a perfect theme for the brutal and cunning Thomas Shelby and his family. But I was totally hooked when I heard his song, "Breathless" which has about 1000 words in about a three-minute song. I since saw that he has a blog called, The Red Hand Files.
Nick looks like a cross between Iggy Pop and Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire; no offense to Nick but he looks very intense.
But listening to his songs and reading his blog opened my eyes to how thoughtful and eloquent he is. Take this excerpt from his blog which is his reply to a question from a reader who asked, "What are your thoughts on free speech? Do you think it is a right?"
We humans are subtle and chaotic creatures, full of ambiguities and contradictions, and it is this that makes up our distinctiveness. We are fully and necessarily different from each other, and even though we have the entirely human tendency to reduce each other to generalisations based on arbitrary categorisations of identity, such as race or religion or gender, we must resist as best we can, for it is uncharitable at best to deny any human their rightful individual sovereignty, their specialness. It is our distinctiveness that is the very thing that should be prized.
Each of us is an amalgam of all we have loved and lost and learned, our peronsal successes and failures, our particular regrets, and our singular joys – and part of that uniqueness is that we think in different ways. Not all of our thinking is right or fully formed, far from it, but there it is, regardless – that flawed and terrifying uniqueness of thought. So, it is little wonder that people adopt and signal a kind of protective groupthink, because our own true thoughts, at their most interesting, can be terrifying. In fact, humans are mostly distinct individuals thinking terrifying things.
Wow, that is a powerful two-paragraph introduction to the question. Just digesting that takes a lot of thought.
But the ending is pretty spot on on why suppression of ideas and the protection to espouse them is timely.
Jesus roamed the land expressing what were, at the time, considered dangerous and heretical ideas. He was literally the embodiment of the terrifying idea. He was followed around by a nervous coterie of muttering scribes and Sadducees whose purpose was to catch him out – expose not just His dangerous ideas, but to lay bare and persecute his uniqueness. They, of course, succeeded and Christ was cancelled upon the Cross. These impossible, dangerous ideas – to love your enemy, to love the poor, to forgive others – were terrifying and unconscionable and forbidden in His day, but became, in time, the better ideas that underpin the society in which many of us are lucky enough to live today. It is worth remembering that. I think we must be careful around our assumptions of what ideas we think are right and what ideas we think are wrong, and what we do with those ideas, because it is the terrifying idea – the shocking, offending, unique idea – that may just save the world.
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