'Disagreeable' people make the world better for children

Amid the gloom, there are always reasons to be cheerful. Take Hugh Jackson, who through his professional activities saved the lives of very many children and young people. He died last month at the age of 95. It's highly likely that most readers don't even know who he was - indeed, neither did I until recently. How he worked and what he did makes a salutary lesson, but I'll leave you in suspense for a few lines while you rack your brains.

I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath: Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, the main thesis of which is that being the underdog is not always a bad thing. There is, though, a secondary set of ideas running through the book, that while outsiders or underdogs often lose, when they succeed, they tend to do so by looking at the world in new ways and refusing to be limited to orthodox thinking. Often this fails - the underdog does not always win - but, when it works, serious progress can be made. George Bernard Shaw said: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Of course this aphorism is true only in part - if everyone followed it we would have chaos. But, on occasion, progress can only be made by being unreasonable or difficult - what Gladwell calls "disagreeable", not in the sense of being unlikable, but refusing to accept or agree with the prevailing wisdom.