Bertrand Russell (Gentle Gadfly)

Some Comments on the Good Life

 

“It's been said that man is a rational animal.  All my life I've been searching for evidence

of this..."

 

Good morning! I’m Bertrand Russell, and I just quoted myself. Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today.  I’m very happy to be here partly for two reasons: 

 

First, ever since I was fired by Cambridge back in 1916 for being a pacifist, I have always wanted to tweak them in some harmless way.   Speaking to you in this American accent might fill the bill very nicely. 

 

Secondly, I was raised by my grandmother, who was a staunch Scotch Presbyterian, but ended up a Unitarian at the age of seventy.  She was a very moral lady, and we often discussed Unitarian principles around the house when I was a boy; her hope for me was that I should become a Unitarian minister. 

 

I should point out though that, unfortunately, at a very young age I began to doubt many religious precepts.  Of course, I kept mum. I was very concerned about this and about how it would affect my own morality. I beg you to indulge me as I quote a few excerpts from a passage in my diary written when I was around fourteen years old.

 

“It is very difficult for anyone to work aright with no aid from religion, by his own internal guidance merely.  I have tried and I may say failed.  But the sad thing is that I have no other resource.  I have no helpful religion. . . . But the great inducement to a good life with me is Granny’s love and the immense pain I know it gives her when I go wrong. But she must, I suppose, die some day and where then will be my stay? . . . We stand in want of a new Luther to renew faith and invigorate Christianity and to do what the Unitarians would do if only they had a really great man such as Luther to lead them.  For religions grow old like trees unless reformed from time to time. . .  We want a new form in accordance with science and yet helpful to a good life.”

 

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I never found the right  “religion” for me, but I trust you can believe me when I say I feel quite at home here, and very glad that the Unitarians--now UU’s--are still around, and offering a bastion of free-thought and tolerance for the world.

 

Indeed, my main theme today will be the good life, and some of the things I feel that the good life entails.   I believe that as I present  my views  you will recognize a very definite kinship with some of your UU principles.  Indeed, my whole life’s work was nothing if not a dedicated, free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

 

However, since humility requires that I assume that there might well be some of you who never even heard of me, I’d like to give you a very brief bio. 

 

First of all, for a man who always regarded such things as mediums and miracles as pure superstitions, it is difficult for me to stand here in the flesh and admit to you that tomorrow I will have been dead for thirty-nine years.   More precisely, I was born in Wales, in 1872, and died February 2, 1970 in my ninety-eighth year.

 

My grandfather, Lord John Russell, had been called by Queen Victoria on two separate occasions to form a government as Prime Minister.   My mother died when I was two, and my father when I was four. The family was always very liberal, and I certainly inherited that trait.  My mother was involved deeply in women’s rights activities and other liberal causes as early as 1860.  My father was denied a third term in Parliament because he advocated the right of contraception. My godfather was a dear friend of my father’s: John Stuart Mill.

 

My upbringing was, aristocratic, liberal, moral and intellectual. My grandmother knew many educated and influential people who visited often. Until I reached the age of ten, I never met a person who hadn’t published at least one book. 

 

I became one of the 20^th Century’s most famous mathematicians, and philosophers, but whenever as a child I expressed some interest in philosophy, I would always be told that all of philosophy could be summed up as follows: What is mind?  No matter.  What is matter?  Never mind!  After the 50^th or 60^th hearing, this idea ceased to be amusing[1].

 

A perhaps ironic small reaction to that joke was that in the 1920’s, that is in my fifties, four of the books I wrote were: An Analysis of Mind, The Analysis of Matter, the ABC of Atoms, and The ABC of Relativity[2]. I am pleased to say that three of these four books are still in print, as are many of the other ninety or so that I wrote.  I have copies of  my bibliography for those interested[3].

 

I was to have four wives and three children over my long life.  My first and last wife were Americans. The last, my dear Edith, I had married when I was eighty, and she was by my side at my demise eighteen years later.

 

I had studied logic and philosophy at Cambridge University. My ground-breaking books established my reputation as a philosopher and mathematician before I was thirty.

 

I started traveling in my twenties, and against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off.  In this respect my travels were very useful to me. I had had an Austrian nanny, so I was perfectly fluent in German.  I also picked up French and some Italian by the bye.

 

I loved Italy, and in 1922 I was planning to attend a Philosophical Congress there, but Mussolini sent word to the organizers that, while no harm should be done to me, any Italian who spoke to me would be assassinated.  Having no wish to leave a trail of blood behind me, I avoided the country which he defiled, dearly as I loved it.

 

I was not wealthy and earned my living by lecturing and writing books and articles.  Besides my “professional” books on philosophy, logic and so forth, I also wrote many, what you might call “popular” books, on many subjects ranging from religion and morals to science, sociology, economics, education, politics, etc.  Three of the more famous ones might be Marriage and Morals, The Conquest of Happiness, and A History of Western Philosophy.   The last was number one on the NY Times best seller list for many weeks.

 

My “popular” writings frequently got me into trouble with the establishment.   In 1916, for example, I was sentenced to six months in prison because of something I had written in a pacifist pamphlet.

 

Ironically, I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the prison gate, who had to take the particulars about me.  He asked my religion, and I replied, “agnostic”. He asked how to spell it, and then remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.”  This remark kept me cheerful for about a week[4].

 

Prison was dull, but I did manage to write a couple of books.  Before and after that, however, excitement reigned:  At a pacifist meeting, while the police stood by watching, I was once attacked by hooligans wielding boards studded with rusty nails.  At suffragette meetings I, and my wife Alys as well, were often pelted with eggs, by protesters who sometimes introduced rats into the meeting to frighten the ladies so photographers could take pictures of them reacting to show how “weak-livered” women were. Actually, it was worse: some of the women who screamed and jumped around the most had been plants.  I had never heard of slaves rebelling against being set free, but many women hated the suffragettes, the most ardent of those was Queen Victoria herself.  I found this quite puzzling[5].

 

Allow me also a footnote: I will be quoting myself today using the word man to mean men and women. I haven’t been back long enough to revise these texts and make them non-sexist yet idiomatic, and I beg your indulgence.[6]

 

In 1931, my older brother, Frank died, and I became the third Earl of Russell.  That is, I became a Lord of the Realm.  The first thing I did was call my publisher to make sure he did not use my title on my books or in any advertisements about them.

 

In 1940, I was offered a lectureship to teach mathematical logic in the philosophy department at NY City College.  A fallacious conspiracy instigated by an Episcopal Bishop, supported by his Catholic counterpart, got me fired because of lies about what I had said in books on marriage, adultery, etc.,  and education some years earlier. The good Bishop had induced a woman to sue on the contention that I would corrupt the morals of her daughter, who was not even enrolled. The trial created  an international scandal with daily headlines castigating me.  The lawyer for the prosecution pronounced all my works of about half a century: “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber.”[7] One conclusion I reached from this episode was: Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate[8].

 

Unfortunately the publicity of this outrageous witch-hunt, full of nothing but lies, made it impossible for me to earn a living for a considerable time. 

 

Then, surprise of surprises, in 1950, just some ten years later, while visiting with Einstein at Princeton, I was informed that I had won the Nobel Prize for literature. This was primarily because of  Marriage and Morals (1929), one of the books at the heart of the trumped-up controversy. 1949 was also a good year for me, as I had received the British Order of Merit. King George VI was affable but somewhat embarrassed to be pinning such a prestigious medal on the chest of a jailbird[9].

In the fifties,  among various causes, I was also active within the Homosexual Law Reform Society, being one of the signatories of Anthony Edward Dyson's letter calling for a change in the law regarding homosexual practices, which I was pleased to see were legalized in 1967.  The Government didn’t come after me for that one; I had become almost “respectable” in many quarters.[10]. 

Though I was put in jail again when I was ninety, for demonstrating for  British nuclear disarmament. They let me out after a week because of my age. I advocated world government throughout my life. You can certainly say that, like UU’s, I really did believe in: a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

 

Obviously, my life was much more that just philosophy and mathematics.

With respect to philosophy, I would say that the theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

 

Summing up: When I was a child my grandmother gave me her Bible; inside the fly leaf she had written a biblical verse: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” I am proud to say that I never did.

 

Before moving to my theme of the good life, I ask you kindly bear in mind that these few minutes can be but an introduction to such a vast topic.  I should like to repeat what I said often over many years about my widely attended lectures in America and around the world: If you really want to know what I think, you should read my works.

 

I expect that many of you are familiar with my writings about religion where you will find that when I matured, the core of my own view on religion became really that of Lucretius: I regard it mainly [though not entirely] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I have presented that view in various works and have also argued against what I believe are certain unsustainable “proofs” of the existence of God and other beliefs.[11]  In some quarters, my arguments were and still are no doubt found scandalous, if not wicked[12].

 

I am usually referred to as an atheist, though philosophically it is more accurate to say I am an agnostic. For, were I an atheist, I would have to be able to prove that God does not exist.  That, I  am unable to do. I hasten to point out that I cannot do so for Zeus or any of the deities of other faiths either. I do not believe they exist, but I always left myself open to being convinced by rational arguments. Most of my life,  this position cost me dearly, and made me persona non grata in many places.

 

If you disagree with my views, by all means write about it, and from my perch in eternity I will smile. For I have always felt a real and solid pleasure when anybody points out a fallacy in any of my views, because I care much less about my opinions than about their being true. Besides, I have always believed that in all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

 

Since my views on Religion are well publicized, I hope you won’t mind if I do not rehash those old arguments today.  Further, as Voltaire so rightly said, metaphysics leads only to darkness, not light. Instead, I thought in these few minutes I would rather share with you some more uplifting comments about the matter of a good and happy life.

 

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind[13].  One small part of my response to those, was my book,  The Conquest of Happiness, (1930), some of which I will cite today.  It was a best-seller and is still being widely read.  It received some criticism but many rave reviews in very respectable journals. The Atlantic Monthly said: “[it is] . . . a primer of self-regeneration, a most excellent book.  This manual of systematized common sense, sane and forthright, should be read by every parent, teacher, minister, and Congressman in the land.”

 

I had once suggested that one way one might define the good life would be   one that is inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Those broad terms need some defining, of course, and I have done so elsewhere at length. The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good[14].

 

I will begin by saying that I believe I have successfully argued that one does not have to believe in God or Hell to be moral and lead a good life.  Indeed, history is replete with many powerful people who believed in eternal damnation but nevertheless did very damnable things[15]. Theologians are fond of saying, “God’s laws are good.” Well, logically that very proposition proves that they also believe that there is another standard against which to judge God’s laws.

 

This is an ethical as much as a religious question. I examine this idea a length in my books on ethics[16]. The exact basis for ethics is a matter of opinion. Yet, I ask you, has there ever been a civilization where such things as random murder, stealing and perjury by citizens against each other were considered ethical?  If someone from that society came along with a sacred book, reputedly from his god, that said such things were good, would anybody believe them?  Of course not. You can’t possibly have a society under such conditions.  So, saying God’s laws are good simply says they conform to a standard of ethics that we have gotten from other sources.  Just as the Good Samaritan, who did the ethical thing, but had never heard of Christianity and, not being a Jew, was not using the Bible as his guide.

 

So, today we shall put aside discussing what is “good” in a moral sense with respect to the good life. We know what that is. And we all recognize that without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value. For my part, I think the important virtues are kindness and intelligence[17].

 

I suggested the good life is “guided by knowledge,” ; let us consider knowledge first and leave “inspired by love” for last[18]. 

 

As I said above, I have defined knowledge in depth elsewhere. For today, I will define knowledge as the recording in the mind of the data of experience, and deductions made directly from that input[19].

 

[As time permits give account of sea plane accident in Norway, 1948, and how smoking saved my life.][20]

 

In short, we must distinguish it from “belief”.  If, for example, one person believes the world is flat, and another believes it is round, they can look into the matter scientifically and logically, and achieve knowledge of the fact.   A great many of the world’s troubles stem from the fact that people fail to make the distinction between knowledge and belief.

 

In that connection I was gratified to see in the 1960’s that the Church forgave Galileo after three hundred years, though I was saddened to see that the statue of him scheduled for the Vatican was cancelled just last week.

 

When scientists disagree they do not invoke armies, they wait for further evidence, because they know they are not infallible.  But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, their is nothing for it but mutual hatred and open or covert appeal to force. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion[21].  Are there not people in the world today, doing horrible things looking for a reward in another life? In these and most cases, war and violence do not determine who is right - only who is left. This is not the road to the good life and happiness. The most savage controversies are often about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

 

Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life. In the Middle Ages, when pestilence appeared in a country, holy men advised the population to assemble in churches and pray for deliverance; the result was that the infection spread with extraordinary rapidity.  This was an example of love without knowledge.  WWI was a horrific example of knowledge without love.

 

Often, the degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts--the less you know the hotter you get. To have a good life, a happy life, knowledge must be verified by factual reality. What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

 

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action--or perhaps by mob hysteria fanned by demagogies. If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.  On the other hand, the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity, though underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind far more likely to benefit the world than any system of organized beliefs.

 

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

 

Some people think knowledge is based solely on authority: A sacred book, an ancient  philosopher and so forth.  Aristotle, for instance, deserves tremendous credit for his developments in logic. It is important that he should be read and studied. However, his logic has been kept stagnant and sacrosanct for over two thousand years.  No modern logician uses it or thinks it is a proper way at arriving at truth.  Of course Aristotle was the main authority Saint Thomas Aquinas used for his Summa Theologica. He and everyone else until the Enlightenment, conveniently ignored absolute absurdities that Aristotle expounded, and simply accepted him as the authority. They fail to confirm his cure for insomnia in elephants, or his contention that a shrewmouse is dangerous to a horse, especially if the shrewmouse is pregnant.  Aristotle, believe it or not, staunchly maintained that women have fewer teeth than men.  He had two wives in his life, and it never even occurred to him to ask one to open her mouth so he could count. 

 

Blind acceptance of authority is called authoritarianism,\; it is not knowledge, and it cannot lead to a good life.  In fact, if you check me out on this, you will find, I think, that most wars and other horrors that have made life miserable for generations, and are still doing so today, are often based on unsubstantiated beliefs, not facts, not knowledge. 

 

Fear is the main source of superstition and cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.  In troubled times that can be difficult. Going against authority takes courage. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric--like my views on adultery, as one small example. Yet, those in search of the good life must always remember that neither a man, nor woman, nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. It seems to me, for instance, that only a man dominated by fear would join the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascisti. In a world of brave people, such persecuting organizations could not exist.[22]

 

We must keep in mind, that every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

 

A habit of basing convictions and beliefs upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers. Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.  Knowledge based on evidence is needed for happiness.

 

Of course, sometimes, we know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life can spring. Which brings us to love.

 

In this connection,  I once said  in an interview, “The root of the matter? The thing I mean? is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.”  (After saying this I received suitcases full of telegrams and letters from Christian leaders from around the world welcoming me back to the fold.  I was at pains to explain that I was merely trying to make clear I was not talking about sexual love.  Had I been writing for a professional audience, instead of simply speaking to the public, I would more likely have used a word like agape.)

 

But, whatever you call it, UU’s by your history of involvement in social issues have shown that you already understand what I mean by love in this context. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

 

Love of any type is far too vast and complex a subject to treat in this forum.  And so I would like to finish up my suggestions for a good life, happiness and love with some related, general observations.

 

There are certain things in human nature which take us beyond Self without effort.  The commonest of these is love, more particularly parental love, which in some sense is so generalized as to embrace the whole human race.  Another is knowledge.  There is no reason to suppose that Galileo was particularly benevolent, yet he lived for an end which was not defeated by his death.  Another is art.  (Each of us is an Atlas to the world of his own ideals, and the poet, more than anyone else, lightens the burden for weary shoulders.)

 

 But in fact every interest in something outside your own body makes life to that degree impersonal.  For this reason, paradoxical as it may seem, a person of wide and vivid interests finds less difficulty in leaving life that some miserable hypochondriac whose interests are bounded by his own ailments.  Thus the perfection of courage is found in the person of many interests, who feels his ego to be but a small part of the world, not through despising himself, but through valuing much that is not himself.  This can hardly happen except where instinct is free and intelligence is active.  From the union of the two grows a comprehensiveness of outlook unknown both to the voluptuary and to the ascetic; and to such an outlook personal death appears a trivial matter. (w. 422)

 

You UU’s have respect for the interdependent web of existence.  In 1912 I published my own view of that interdependence when I said that of the two natures in man, the particular or animal being lives in instinct, and seeks the welfare of the body and its descendants, while the universal (some would say divine or spiritual) being seeks union with the universe, and desires freedom from all that impedes its seeking. In union with the world the soul finds its freedom. There are three kinds of union: union in thought, union in feeling, union in will. Union in thought is knowledge, union in feeling is love, union in will is service. There are three kinds of disunion: error, hatred and strife. What promotes disunion is insistent instinct, which is of the animal part of our nature: what promotes union is the combination of knowledge, love, and consequent service which is wisdom, the supreme good for us.

 

Finally, if I had the power to organize education as I should wish it to be, I should seek to substitute for the old orthodox religions. . . something which is perhaps hardly to be called religion, since it is merely a focusing of attention upon well-ascertained facts.  I should seek to make young people vividly aware of the past, vividly realizing that the future of mankind will in all likelihood be immeasurably longer than its past, profoundly conscious of the minuteness of the planet upon which we live and of the fact that life on this planet is only a temporary incident[23]; and at the same time with these facts which tend to emphasize the insignificance of the individual, I should present quite another set of facts designed to impress upon the mind of the young the greatness of which the individual is capable, and the knowledge that throughout all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us.  Spinoza long ago wrote of human bondage and human freedom . . . and the essence of what I wish to convey differs little from what he has said.

 

          An individual who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him.  The person capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe.  He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains.  And he will see that the person whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world.  In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man[24].

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presented to the Nature Coast Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship

 Feb. 1, 2009

By Joe Wetzel

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX I

 

Poem by Bertrand Russell’s Grandmother, Lady John Russell.

 

(Presented in Russell’s Autobiography, Chapter 2, Adolescence.)

 

O Science metaphysical

And very very quizzical

You only make this maze of life the mazier;

For boasting to illuminate

 Such riddles dark as Will and Fate

You muddle them to hazier and hazier.

 

The cause of every action,

You expound with satisfaction;

Through the mind in all its corners and recesses

You say that you have travelled,

And all the problems unravelled

And axioms you call your learned guesses.

 

Right and wrong you’ve so dissected,

And their fragments so connected,

That which we follow doesn’t seem to matter;

But the cobwebs you have wrought,

And the silly flies they have caught,

It needs no broom miraculous to shatter.

 

You know no more than I,

What is laughter, tear, or sigh,

Or love, or hate, or anger, or compassion;

Metaphysics, then, adieu

Without you I can do,

And I think you’ll very soon be out of fashion.

 

 

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APPENDIX II

 

The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

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