Transcript
Veteran Benefits Representative (0:00)
My education would cost $42,000, but with VA benefits, I'm paying zero. VA covers my tuition, supplies and housing, and it can cover yours too. Get what you earn. Visit choose.va.gov not all veterans are eligible.
Bertrand Russell (0:13)
For the type or amount of benefits mentioned here.
ABC Radio Announcer (0:15)
Standby for the premier broadcast of a new series of talks called Living in the Atomic Age and presenting the distinguished English philosopher and author Bertrand Russell. And be sure to continue listening to ABC this evening for the important forum America's Town Meeting at the Air. Each week, qualified experts are invited to Town Meeting to discuss a pertinent problem of our time. Tonight, Dr. Charles S. Johnson, President of Fisk University, and Mr. Stanley High, author and editor, debate the provocative question, are we losing our moral courage? For a thought provoking program, hear America's Town Meeting this evening on abc. The public affairs department of the American Broadcasting Company presents the first in a series of six transcribed lectures entitled Living in an Atomic Age by the distinguished English philosopher, mathematician, sociologist and author Bertrand Russell. The subject of the first lecture is Present Perplexities. Lord Russell.
Bertrand Russell (1:21)
The present time is is one in which the prevailing mood is a feeling of impotent perplexity. We tell each other dreadful stories of atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, of cities exterminated, of Russian hordes, of famine and ferocity everywhere. But although our reason tells us that we ought to shudder at such a prospect, there is another part of us that enjoys it so that we have no firm will to avert misfortune, and there is a deep division in our souls between the sane and the insane parts. In quiet times the insane parts can slumber throughout the day and wake but in times like our working time as well, and all rational thinking becomes pale and divorced from the will, our lives become balanced on a sharp edge of hypotheses. If there is to be a war, one way of life is reasonable, if not another. To the majority of mankind such a hypothetical existence is intolerably uncomfortable, and in practice they adopt one hypothesis or the other, but without complete conviction. Uncertainty baulks the impulse to every irksome effort and generates a tone of frivolous misery, mistakenly thought to be pleasure, which turns outward and becomes hatred of those who are felt to be its cause. Through this hatred it brings daily nearer the catastrophe which it dreads. The nations seem caught in a tragic fate, as though, like characters in a Greek drama, they were blinded by some offended God, bewildered by mental fog, they march towards the precipice. While they imagine that they are marching away from must be said that the Purely intellectual problems presented by the world of our day are exceedingly difficult. There is not only the great problem can we defend our Western world without actual war? There are also problems in Asia and problems in Africa and problems in tropical America which cannot be solved within the framework of traditional political ideas. There are those, it is true, who are quite certain that they can solve these problems by ancient methods. So limited is their intelligence and their imagination that they are never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail us as saviors. But let us not be one sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple minded and equally out of date. He too believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and blessed the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. I do not think this is necessary. I think there is a view of man and his destiny and his present troubles which can give certainty and hope, together with the completest understanding of the moods, the despairs, and the maddening doubts that beset modern men. I have been speaking hitherto of public perplexities, but it is not these alone which trouble the Western mind. Traditional systems of dogma and traditional codes of conduct have not the hold that they formerly had. Men and women are often in genuine doubt as to what is right and what is wrong, and even as to whether right and wrong are anything more than ancient superstitions. When they try to decide such questions for themselves, they find them too difficult. They cannot discover any clear purpose that they ought to pursue or any clear principle by which they should be guided. Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable, their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say, they are accepted by almost everybody, unquestioningly. And they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life in the west is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse, which only the poet can distinguish from prose. Two great systems of dogma lie in wait for the modern man when his spirit is weary. I mean the system of Rome and The system of Moscow. Neither of these gives scope for the free mind, which is at once the glory and the torment of Western man. It is the torment only because of growing pains. The free man, full grown, shall be full of joy and vigour and mental health. But in the meantime he suffers.