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Living in an Atomic Age 53-05-12 (1) Present Perplexities
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Living in an Atomic Age 53-05-12 (1) Present Perplexities
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Veteran Benefits Representative
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.
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Bertrand Russell
For the type or amount of benefits mentioned here.
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ABC Radio Announcer
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.
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Bertrand Russell
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.
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Veteran Benefits Representative
Not.
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Bertrand Russell
Only publicly, but privately also. The world has owe to what we believe and what we feel ourselves compelled to disbelieve. There are ways of feeling that are traditional and that have all the prestige of the past and weighty authority, and that yet are not adapted to the world in which we live, where new techniques have made some new virtues necessary and some old virtues unnecessary. The Hebrew prophets, surrounded by hostile nations and determined that their race should not be assimilated by Gentile conquerors, developed a fierce doctrine in which the leading conception was sin. The Gentiles sinned always and in all their ways, but the Jews, alas, were only too apt to fall into sin themselves. When they did so, they they were defeated in battle and had to weep by the waters of Babylon. It is this pattern that has inspired moralists ever since. The virtuous man has been conceived as one who, though continually surrounded by temptation, though passionately prompted to sin, nevertheless by almost superhuman strength of will, succeeds in walking along the straight and narrow path, looking meanwhile disdainfully to the right and left at those inferior beings who have loitered to pluck flowers, by the way. In this conception, virtue is difficult, negative, and arid. It is constrictive and suspicious of happiness. It is persuaded that our natural impulses are bad and that society can only be held together by means of rigid prohibitions. I do not wish to pretend that that society can hold together if people murder and steal. What I do say is that the kind of man whom I should wish to see in the world is one who will have no impulse to murder, who will abstain from murder not because it is prohibited, but because his thoughts and feelings carry him away from impulses of destruction. The whole conception of sin has, as it were, God did so far at least, as conscious thought and feeling are concerned. Most people have not thought out any other system of ethics, and have not, perhaps theoretically, rejected the old system, but it has lost its hold on them. They do not murder or steal as a rule, because it would not be to their interest to do so. But one cannot say as much for their obedience to the seventh commandment. They have, in fact, no wish to conform to the ancient pattern. The publican thanks God that he is not as this Pharisee, and imagines that in so doing he has caught the point of the parable. It does not occur to him that feeling superior is what is reprehended, and that whether it is the publican or the Pharisee who feels superior is an unimportant detail. I should wish to persuade those to whom traditional morals have gone dead and who yet feel the need of some serious purpose over and above momentary pleasure, as there is a way of thinking and feeling which is not difficult for those who have not been trained in its opposite, and which is not one of self restraint, negation and condemnation. 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. Unhappiness is deeply implanted in the souls of most of us. How many people we all know who go through life apparently gay and who yet are perpetually in search of intoxication, whether of the Bacchic kind or some other. The happy man does not desire intoxication, nor does he envy his neighbour and therefore hate him. He can live the life of impulse like a child, because happiness makes his impulses fruitful and not destructive. There are many men and women who imagine themselves emancipated from the shackles of ancient codes, but who in fact are emancipated only in the upper layers of their minds. Below these layers lies the sense of guilt, crouching like a wild beast, waiting for moments of weakness or inattention, and growling in venomed angers which rise to the surface in strange, distorted form. Such people have the worst of both worlds. The feeling of guilt makes real happiness impossible for them, but the conscious rejection of old codes of behavior makes them act perpetually in ways that feed the maw of the ancient beast beneath. A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams. I do not think that the best kind of life is possible in our day for those who, below the level of consciousness, are still obsessed by the load of sin. It is obvious that there are things that had better not be done. But I do not think the best way to avoid the doing of such things is to label them sin and represent them as almost irresistibly attractive. And so I should wish to offer the world something scarcely to be called an ethic, at any rate in the old acceptation of that word, but something which nonetheless will save men from moral perplexity and from remorse and from condemnation of others. What I should put in the place of an ethic is in the old sense is encouragement and opportunity for all the impulses that are creative and expensive. I should do everything possible to liberate men from fear. Not only the conscious fears, but the old, imprisoned primeval terrors that we brought with us out of the jungle. I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes. That it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men. When all this is not only understood, but deeply felt, it will be easy to live in a way that brings happiness equally to ourselves and to others. If men could think and feel in this way, not only their personal problems, but all the problems of world politics, even the most abstruse and difficult, would melt away suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountaintop. The landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession.
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ABC Radio Announcer
You have just heard the first in a series of six lectures by Bertrand Russell entitled Living in an Atomic Age. This has been a transcribed feature of the Public affairs department of ABC in cooperation with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Bertrand Russell will be heard next week at this same time. We invite you to listen. The program came to you from New York. This is ABC Radio Network.