Bertrand Russell's Best

Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415473583
• eBook ISBN: 9781134027194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Bertrand Russell is regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest minds. Well-known for his profound knowledge and controversial approach to myriad of different issues and subjects such as sex, marriage, religion, education and politics, his prolific works also exhibit great intellectual wit and humour. First published in 1958, Bertrand Russell's Best is a delightfully funny and entertaining book, and a striking testament to the remarkable life work and wit of Bertrand Russell.

1

PSYCHOLOGY

Human nature has changed little since the time of primitive man. Our understanding of the forces which control behaviour, however, has increased immeasurably with the development of scientific methods of inquiry in the field of psychology. Only a century ago psychology was completely unscientific; now psychology is an independent science, the lastest discipline to be separated from philosophy. Lord Russell maintained, however, that our knowledge of psychology was not used to its fullest advantage in solving the ancient problem of how men can live together in peace. The Good life he summed up in a single phrase: ‘the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge’.

Lord Russell said that the fundamental motives that appeal to most men are ‘acquisitiveness’, ‘vanity’, ‘rivalry’, and ‘love of power’. In politics, for example, the springs of human action are derived from these four basic drives. He observed a classical axiom of human behaviour when he noted that man cannot forget the rudiments of his barbaric past despite his recent adventure into the space odyssey. Since 1950 the species ‘man’ has acquired more knowledge than in all his previous history, yet his remote ancestors still remind him of his primitive past. Must his insatiable appetites be the epitaph of his ultimate folly?

Not often in his long and perhaps multifarious career did Lord Russell choose to remain free from the main streams of both popular and scientific controversy. For example, his harsh disapproval of traditional organised religion is well documented and known to the literate public. What is generally not known, however, is that his seminal contributions to the evolution of Logic and Mathematics with Whitehead in the early years of the twentieth-century upset, and in fact contradicted, the authoritarian views of Aristotle which had been cached in hoary tradition for over 2,000 years. Russell and Whitehead demonstrated that the basic assumptions and premises of logic and mathematics are identical. Lord Russell refused to remain silent on any issue until death stilled his voice.

Few modern thinkers dared to be as candid in the expression of unwelcomed thoughts as Lord Russell. His attitude was uncompromising: he was not afraid to run the risk of questioning ‘sacred’ matters in spite of the fact that his free views exposed him to repeated attacks by bigots and obscurantists. Those who fear the embarrassment of having their noble façade dismantled quite naturally rebel against anyone who suggests a critical examination of their motives and beliefs. A number of the selections in this chapter are taken from Lord Russell's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, delivered at Stockholm in 1950. In this lecture his keen observation and sharp satires are focused on human passion and their effect upon mankind. Such topics as vanity, power, and the love of excitement are stripped of their customary trappings and laid out in the nude to lie in state.

Many of the things that Lord Russell attacked during his long and often stormy life – his specific attacks on religion, politics, and sex – have not been corrected, but his sharper satires have not been dulled either. Probably the best, and certainly the most succinct description of his literary style is that each sentence of his prose was like a polished gem.

* * *

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying, ‘Look at me.’ ‘Look at me’ is one of the fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame. There was a Renaissance Italian princeling who was asked by the priest on his death-bed if he had anything to repent of. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is one thing. On one occasion I had a visit from the Emperor and the Pope simultaneously. I took them to the top of my tower to see the view, and I neglected the opportunity to throw them both down, which would have given me immortal fame.’ History does not relate whether the priest gave him absolution. (NPAS)

I once befriended two little girls from Esthonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner. (NPAS)

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor, which enables them for the first time in their lives to have the illusion, for a few brief moments, that it is better to be alive than dead. (NPAS)

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power. The people who enjoy the greatest glory in the United States are film stars, but they can be put in their place by the committee for Un-American Activities, which enjoys no glory whatever. (NPAS)

The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings, especially in males. I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was exciting, war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage will manage to commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her. This situation, I imagine, is not boring. But with the coming of agriculture life began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who remained, and still remain, in the hunting stage. (CH)

The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if the herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds. If you are English and someone says to you: ‘The French are your brothers,’ your first instinctive feeling will be: ‘Nonsense, they shrug their shoulders, and talk French. And I am even told that they eat frogs.’ If he explains to you that one may have to fight the Russians, that, if so, it will be desirable to defend the line of the Rhine, and that, if the line of the Rhine is to be defended, the help of the French is essential, you will begin to see what he means when he says that the French are your brothers. But if some fellow-traveller were to go on to say that the Russians also are your brothers, he would be unable to persuade you, unless he could show that we are in danger from the Martians. We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love. (NPAS)

Civilised life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are few and rabbits are many, I watched a whole populace satisfying the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skilful slaughter of many thousands of rabbits. But in London or New York, where people are many and rabbits are few some other means must be found to gratify primitive impulse. I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. (NPAS)

Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fufilment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in a paralysing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or sub-conscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others. (NEP, introduction.)

The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasions which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed. To an early Victorian man a woman's ankles were sufficient stimulus, whereas a modern man remains unmoved by anything up to the thigh. This is merely a question of fashion in clothing. If nakedness were the fashion, it would cease to excite us, and women would be forced, as they are in certain savage tribes, to adopt clothing as a means of making themselves sexually attractive. Exactly similar considerations apply to literature and pictures: what was exciting in the Victorian Age would leave men of a franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be. On these grounds, although I fear that few will agree with me, I am firmly persuaded that there ought to be no law whatsoever on the subject of obscene publications. (MM)

Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. (P:ANSA)

Anthropologists have described how Papuan head-hunters, deprived by white authority of their habitual sport, lose all zest, and are no longer able to be interested in anything. I do not wish to infer that they should have been allowed to go on hunting heads, but I do mean that it would have been worth while if psychologists had taken some trouble to find some innocent substitute activity. Civilised Man everywhere is, to some degree, in the position of the Papuan victims of virtue. We have all kinds of aggressive impulses, and also creative impulses, which society forbids us to indulge, and the alternatives that it supplies in the shape of football matches and all-in wrestling are hardly adequate. Anyone who hopes that in time it may be possible to abolish war should give serious thought to the problem of satisfying harmlessly the instincts that we inherit from long generations of savages. For my part I find a sufficient outlet in detective stories, where I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but I know there are those to whom this vicarious outlet is too mild, and for them something stronger should be provided. (AI)

In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burned, it sometimes happened that one of them, by a particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled before being put into flames. This would make the spectators so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments of the victim was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act. The same sort of thing applies to war. People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and that there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous. (UE)

In order to be happy we require all kinds of supports to our self-esteem. We are human beings; therefore human beings are the purpose of creation. We are Americans; therefore America is God's own country. We are white; and therefore God cursed Ham and his descendants who were black. We are Protestant or Catholic, as the case may be; therefore Catholics or Protestants, as the case may be, are an abomination. We are male; and therefore women are unreasonable; or female; and therefore men are brutes. We are Easterners; and therefore the West is wild and woolly; or Westerners, and therefore the East is effete. We work with our brains; and therefore it is the educated classes that are important; or we work with our hands; and therefore manual labour alone gives dignity. Finally, and above all, we each have one merit which is entirely unique: we are Ourself. With these comforting reflections we go out to do battle with the world; without them our courage might fail. Without them, as things are, we should feel inferior because we have not learned the sentiment of equality. If we could feel genuinely that we are the equals of our neighbours, neither their betters nor their inferiors, perhaps life would become less of a battle, and we should need less in the way of intoxicating myth to give us Dutch courage. (UE)

There was, until the end of the eighteenth century, a theory that insanity is due to possession by devils. It was inferred that any pain suffered by the patient is also suffered by the devils, so that the best cure is to make the patient suffer so much that the devils will decide to abandon him. The insane, in accordance with this theory, were savagely beaten. This treatment was tried on King George III when he was mad, but without success. It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anaesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anaesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer because of the curse of Eve. In the West votes for women proved this doctrine mistaken, but in Japan, to this day, women in childbirth are not allowed any alleviation through anaesthetics. As the Japanese do not believe in Genesis, this piece of sadism must have some other justification. (UE)

By self-interest Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest. But the habit of foregoing present satisfactions for the sake of future advantages is irksome, and when passions are roused the prudent restraints of social behaviour become difficult to endure. Those who, at such times, throw them off, acquire a new energy and sense of power from the cessation of inner conflict, and, though they may come to disaster in the end, enjoy meanwhile a sense of god-like exaltation which, though known to the great mystics, can never be experienced by a merely pedestrian virtue. The solitary part of their nature reasserts itself, but if the intellect survives the reassertion must clothe itself in myth. The mystic becomes one with God, and in the contemplation of the infinite feels himself absolved from duty to his neighbour. The anarchic rebel does even better: he feels himself not one with God, but God. Truth and duty, which represent our subjection to matter and to our neighbours, exist no longer for the man who has become God; for others, truth is what he posits, duty what he commands. If we could all live solitary and without labour, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators. (HWP)

Happiness is promoted by associations of persons with similar tastes and similar opinions. Social intercourse may be expected to develop more and more along these lines, and it may be hoped that by these means the loneliness that now afflicts so many unconventional people will be gradually diminished almost to vanishing point. This will undoubtedly increase their happiness, but it will of course diminish the sadistic pleasure which the conventional at present derive from having the unconventional at their mercy. I do not think, however, that this is a pleasure which we need be greatly concerned to preserve. (CH)

Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labour. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialised muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive – a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable – other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement. This is a matter which has been too little considered, both by moralists and by social reformers. The social reformers are of the opinion that they have more serious things to consider. The moralists, on the other hand, are immensely impressed with the seriousness of all the permitted outlets of the love of excitement; the seriousness, however, in their minds, is that of Sin. Dance halls, cinemas, this age of jazz, are all, if we may believe our ears, gateways to Hell, and we should be better employed sitting at home contemplating our sins. I find myself unable to be in entire agreement with the grave men who utter these warnings. The devil has ma...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
• PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
• INTRODUCTION
• MEANING OF SYMBOLS
• 1 Psychology
• 2 Religion
• 3 Sex and Marriage
• 4 Education
• 5 Politics
• 6 Ethics
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS