Revisiting Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize Lecture

[ancianita]

Some call Bertrand Russell's lecture a mapping of human power.

I see this lecture as a warning about human inertia.

In light of how humans approach a novel virus pandemic, and in light of how global big fossil block all attempts to transition themselves to clean infrastructure, saying "sure, we concede climate change is man made, but we're in too deep, so find a way that doesn't demand our sacrifice," I see it as a mapping of human inertia.

Russell says that four fundamental human desires -- acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power -- are the motives that make up power.
I'm more interested in his detailing of "less fundamental but still considerably important" motives -- excitement (fight club, vices & sports kind of escape from boredom), fear and hatred -- since, from DC to local commissions and councils, those motives seem to deflect & drag on our politics and media.

Joe Biden takes these human foibles into account as he makes a better future, imo. What makes President Biden so great, particularly for a country this size, is that he's shown that he uses the benefit of hindsight as one of his tools to secure more political unity on covid, climate and infrastructure.

In thinking more along those lines, and watching where Biden goes from here, I appreciate in hindsight Bertrand Russell's "state of the human union" address here.

(The lecture's paragraph text is unwieldy by today's standards, so I've broken up a couple here.)

... What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive. It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess in alcohol or gambling. It is destructive when it takes the form of mob violence. And above all it is destructive when it leads to war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful outlets of this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such innocent outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as it is kept within constitutional bounds. But these are not sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that is most exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses...

...We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.

All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide...


If you consider how many Germans were killed in the late war, and how much the victors are paying in income tax, you can, by a sum in long division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will find it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the Germans have secured the ancient advantages of turning out the defeated population and occupying their lands. The Western victors, however, have secured no such advantages. It is obvious that modern war is not good business from a financial point of view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much richer if they had not occurred.

If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not – except in the case of a few saints – the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic.

All this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But, you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ? Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millennium will be impossible.

I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not deny that there are better things than selfishness, and that some people achieve these things. I maintain, however, on the one hand, that there are few occasions upon which large bodies of men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above selfishness, while, on the other hand, there are a very great many circumstances in which populations will fall below selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened self-interest.

And among those occasions on which people fall below self-interest are most of the occasions on which they are convinced that they are acting from idealistic motives. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask yourself what it is that makes these motives effective. It is partly because it is so easy to be taken in by a facade of nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have been attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/

Our problems always return to the huge human equality gap in "methods of education." Education has always been how humans kept their power over others. Big fossil knew before Silicon Valley did -- own data, own the world. In hindsight, America's founders' class bias is revealed in their failure to make education a fundamental constitutional right.

[Jim__]

1. I do agree that Russell's talk is both pertinent and thought provoking.

From Russell's talk:

... I think that most current discussions of politics and political theory take insufficient account of psychology. ... in a word, what it is that, as they say, «makes them tick» ...

...

But man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. ...

...

Interwoven with many other political motives are two closely related passions to which human beings are regrettably prone: I mean fear and hate. It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. ...

...

There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. ...

...

The time has come to sum up our discussion. Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike. The broad instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to be built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards other herds. The co-operation within the herd is never perfect. There are members who do not conform, who are, in the etymological sense, «egregious», that is to say, outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below, or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals, prophets, and discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the eccentricity of those who rise above the average, and to treat with a minimum of ferocity those who fall below it.

...

My take may be a little different from your's. I'm mostly thinking about our internal political problems, the problem of Trump and his followers. These problems are mostly based on fear and hate. Joe Biden tries to address the problem of fear; but I'm not sure he even acknowledges the problem of hate. I don't believe we can tolerate the eccentricity and/or ferocity of the trumpers.

[ancianita]

2. And long, for sure.

This lecture is so long that there are many takes on his map. Me, I tended to focus on the local character that votes for political liars -- voters who must have excitement, otherwise they're so bored with politics they wouldn't bother without the drama; they're the same voters who need the stories to feed their fear and hate and sustain their engagement.

I hear you about the hate discussion.
When I reread it, I see him first attach its existence to the instinctual feeling of fear in the paragraph on herds (or tribes) when he says

..I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances.

It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. 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 his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

In that sense, hate and fear are connected as tools for surviving the unknown. But then he gets down to hate as a cultivated thing in society -- as in 'cults' that cultivate, as in purposely feeding and growing both well founded hate and fear, and unfounded -- when he discusses religious and political constructs, like here. That's probably why we so often see the saying, "You reap what you sow" when it comes to politics.

If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to find a way of diminishing fear. The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other.

I do not think that the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely those which always arise between rival groups.

There are, of course, various reasons for hating communists.
First and foremost, we believe that they wish to take away our property. But so do burglars, and although we disapprove of burglars our attitude towards them is very different indeed from our attitude towards communists – chiefly because they do not inspire the same degree of fear.
Secondly, we hate the communists because they are irreligious. But the Chinese have been irreligious since the eleventh century, and we only began to hate them when they turned out Chiang Kai-shek.
Thirdly, we hate the communists because they do not believe in democracy, but we consider this no reason for hating Franco.
Fourthly, we hate them because they do not allow liberty; this we feel so strongly that we have decided to imitate them.
It is obvious that none of these is the real ground for our hatred. We hate them because we fear them and they threaten us. If the Russians still adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion, if they had instituted parliamentary government, and if they had a completely free press which daily vituperated us, then – provided they still had armed forces as powerful as they have now – we should still hate them if they gave us ground for thinking them hostile. There is, of course, the odium theologicum, and it can be a cause of enmity. But I think that this is an offshoot of herd feeling: the man who has a different theology feels strange, and whatever is strange must be dangerous. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated...

To me, that's why he's thought provoking. His ideas hold up over decades -- like the idea that no one is born hating, but it has to be developed by the herd -- because his ideas seem grounded in insight about humans and about their social constructs, and the superior education that he had that helped him make sense of the world. When you read up on his life, you can see that he can be persuaded that he was wrong on a number of things, too. To me, that's the sign of someone who values clear thought grounded in provable science, mathematics and patterns of human events.

(Sorry for the delay in responding. I got caught up in a painting project that got out of hand. )

So, if he's generally right, how are humans going to coordinate with each other over climate, or energy use. It seems like an overwhelming project just to get most humans (or Americans, anyway) to pay attention to the same related things -- clean energy and climate.