Bertrand Russell

“ In such a world, all who are not a menace to their neighbours are bound to be exterminated by war or economic pressure. Art is almost extinct; science still flourishes because it ministers to homicide, but must perish when it has perfected its work by destruction. How is one to say, in such a world, "my will is one with the universal will"? Mr Havelock Ellis professes that his mysticism is free from dogma; but if he supposes that we have anything to do with a universal will other than that of organized mankind, he has adopted all that is essential in the dogma of theism. ”

“ Murder, robbery, and rape are actions which may be prompted by instinct, but an orderly society must repress them. Work, especially when many are employed in one undertaking, requires regularity, which is utterly contrary to our untrained nature. And although a man who followed his impulses in a state of nature would (at least in a cold climate) do a good deal of work in the course of an average day, yet it is very rare indeed that a man has any spontaneous impulse to the work which he has to do in a modern industrial community. He works for the sake of the pay, not because he likes the work. ”

“ Science and machinery have given men new powers over nature and over each other. Unfortunately, the more humane portion of mankind is also the less executive portion, and therefore the new powers have fallen into the hands of men who use them almost wholly to produce misery and crush out whatever is excellent and spontaneous or individual. Unless the champions of humanism rouse themselves to enter the practical world and make themselves masters of the new powers, their cause is doomed. ”

“ All the great flowering periods of art have come at the end of a slowly maturing tradition. There has, of course, been no time for industrialism to generate a tradition, and perhaps, if the absence of tradition were the only thing at fault, we could wait calmly for the operation of time. But I fear that the other element, individual artistic merit, without which no good tradition can be created, can hardly exist in an atmosphere of industrialized commercialism. Commerce which is not industrial is often extraordinarily favourable to art ”

“ Of course war affords the supreme example of instinctive co-operation and hostility. In war, the instinctive prime mover is hostility; the friendly feeling towards our own side is derivative from hatred of the enemy. If we hear that some compatriot with whom we are unacquainted has been captured by the enemy and brutally ill-used, we shall be full of sympathy, whereas if his brother dies a lingering death from cancer we shall take it as a mere statistical fact. ”

“ TO any one who reflects upon industrialism it is clear that it requires, for its successful practice, somewhat different virtues from those that were required in a pre-industrial community. But there is, to my mind, wide-spread misapprehension as to the nature of those virtues, owing to the fact that moralists confine their survey to a short period of time, and are more interested in the success of the individual than in that of the race. ”

“ Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. ”

“ Does this virtue, with its correlative vice, outweigh the opposite virtue with its correlative vice? The fact that a virtue is good in itself is not enough; it is necessary to take account of the vices that it entails and the virtues that it excludes.
I shall define as virtues those mental and physical habits which tend to produce a good community, and as vices those that tend to produce a bad one. Different people have different conceptions of what makes a community good or bad, and it is difficult to find arguments by which to establish the preferability of one's own conception. ”

“ He surveys the world calmly and genially; he does not try to scold men out of their evil ways, but to win them to the life that he considers good by the portrayal of its delights. The holders of power, reinforced by their sycophants among parsons and professors, view the lines of others as consisting essentially of work, with only such intervals of rest as are physiologically necessary. Mr Havelock Ellis views life as essentially play, interrupted by the need of a certain minimum of work to secure the necessaries of existence. ”

“ Let us take some simpler essence—say, a certain shade of colour. Wherever this shade of colour exists, it seems to be the essence itself that exists. All that we do when we call it an "essence" is to ignore its relations in space and time; it is the fact of having such relations that seems to be meant when anything is said to "exist." (This, at least, is one meaning of this very ambiguous word.) It may be suggested that all simple essences do actually exist, in the sense in which a shade of colour exists wherever there is a patch having that colour. ”

“ It is only by these methods that industrialism can be humanized and can realize the possibilities of good which are latent in it. It could be used to lighten physical labour, and to set men free for more agreeable activities. Hitherto, the competitive system has prevented its being so used. It should have made life more leisurely, but it has made it more hustling. Increase of leisure, diminution of hustle, are the ends to be sought, not mere quantitative increase of production. ”

“ This applies to the working classes, but in the middle classes the thwarting of instinct is much more serious. A man who has any ambition cannot marry young, must be very careful how he has children, must if possible marry a girl whose father will help him professionally rather than a girl he likes, and when married must avoid infidelity, except so furtively as not to be found out. Our society is so imbued with the belief that happiness consists in financial success that men do not realize how much they are losing, and how much richer their lives might be if they cared less for money. ”

“ Think of a man like the late Lord Northcliffe, working like a galley-slave to produce bloodshed and misery on a scale hitherto unknown in human history. How admirable it would have been if he could have been persuaded to lie in the sun, or play bridge, or study chess-problems, or even take to drink. ”

“ An immense amount of labour is wasted in getting orders and securing markets. At times when there is a great deal of unemployment, those who are not unemployed are overworked, because otherwise employers could not make a profit. The competitive management of industry for profit is the source of the trouble. For the same reason there is a desire to maximize production, because, with industrial methods, the production of immense quantities of a commodity is more capable of yielding a profit than the production of moderate quantities. ”

“ In each of these great religions, virtue was that line of conduct which would be pursued by a prudent egoist. Neither of these, however, has much influence on the practical morality of our own time. For energetic people, the moral code of our time is that of "success"—the code which my generation learnt in childhood from Smiles' Self-help and which modern young men learn from efficiency experts. ”

“ Instinctive Happiness. I mean by this the sort of thing that is diminished by ill-health and destroyed by a bad liver, the kind of delight in life which one finds always more strongly developed in the young of any mammalian species than in the old. I doubt whether there is anything else that makes as much difference to the value of life from the point of view of the person who has to live it. Those who have instinctive delight in life are happy except when they have positive causes of unhappiness; those who do not have it are unhappy except when they have positive causes of happiness. ”

“ Middle-class men, when they are no longer quite young, are generally filled with envy: envy of their more successful colleagues, envy of the young, and (strange as it may seem) envy of working-men. The result of the first kind of envy is to make them hostile to all intellectual or artistic eminence until it is so well-established that they dare not challenge it; of the second, to make them rejoice in war because it gives them a chance to thwart the young who have to do the fighting ”

“ It is evident that, if the prevalence of competition and envy is to be overcome, an economically stereotyped society is essential. It is also evident that, in the absence of the mediaeval belief that hereditary social grades are of divine ordinance, the only stereotyped society in which people can acquiesce is one which secures economic justice in an obvious form—that is to say, economic equality for all who are willing to work. Until that is secured, our economic system will continue to grind out hatred and ill-will. ”

“ In Mr Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes, London has a roof, it eschews daylight, and has only electric lamps; the Londoner never sees the stars, or even the sun and moon; he knows nothing of "the sweet approach of even or morn." ”

“ Men may grow weary of strenuous futility; the ideal of "efficiency" may lose its appeal. If so, what is most needed is to set forth persuasively the conception of life as an art. The Dance of Life does this with great charm; every page is interesting, and the author has our sympathy throughout. May his words, and those of men who feel as he does, prove potent beyond our expectation. ”

“ Agreeing with Mr Havelock Ellis as to the ends of life, I find it difficult to agree as to means. I believe that those who value these ends must temporarily submit to the yoke of organization and co-operation, since otherwise they will be crushed in detail by clever energetic maniacs. If one could believe in some cosmic purpose, worked out through the folly and wickedness of men, it might be possible to wait patiently for the happy consummation. ”

“ People whose outlook on life is more leisurely have a higher standard for their amusements: they like good plays, good music, and so on, not merely something that enables them to pass the time vacuously. So far, however, science has only intruded into the world of amusement in ways that have made it more trivial and less artistic. ”

“ Inequality must breed strife unless it is supported by a philosophy or religion which even the unfortunate accept. At present, no such doctrine is conceivable. Therefore equality in material goods is an essential condition for the prevalence of friendly feelings between different classes, and even between the more fortunate and the less fortunate members of the same class, or between rivals who hope in time to outdistance each other. A society will not produce much in the way of mental goods unless it is materially stereotyped. ”

“ But if one believes that there is no purpose in the non-human world—at any rate in that part of it with which we are in contact—it is useless to look to anything but human effort to extricate us from the dangers of the time. ”

“ Many women and some men need also to have children sooner or later. To most men, some kind of progressive career is important; both to men and women, a certain amount of occupation imposed by necessity, not chosen for its pleasurable quality, is necessary for the avoidance of boredom. But too much work and too little leisure are more destructive of instinctive happiness than too little work and too much leisure. Another essential is the right amount of human companionship, neither too much nor too little; but as to what is the right amount, people vary greatly. ”

“ With the advance of what is called civilization, our social and material environment has changed faster than our instincts, so that there has been an increasing discrepancy between the acts to which we are impelled by instinct and those to which we are constrained by prudence. ”