In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

by Bertrand Russell

John Maynard Keynes wrote that his friend Bertrand Russell ‘held two ludicrously incompatible beliefs: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other, that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally’.

obiter dicta

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

Medicine, it was true, was dignified by the names of Hippocrates and Galen; but in the intervening period it had become almost confined to Arabs and Jews, and inextricably intertwined with magic. Hence the dubious reputation of such men as Paracelsus.

Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work.

The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill.

Perhaps the most important advantage of ‘useless’ knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction. People show their bias on this matter in various curious ways.

What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos—all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

The philosophy which has been distinctive of Germany begins with Kant, and begins as a reaction against Hume. Kant was determined to believe in causality, God, immortality, the moral law, and so on, but perceived that Hume’s philosophy made all this difficult. He therefore invented a distinction between ‘pure’ reason and ‘practical’ reason. ‘Pure’ reason was concerned with what could be proved, which was not much; ‘practical’ reason was concerned with what was necessary for virtue, which was a great deal. It is of course obvious that ‘pure’ reason was simply reason, while ‘practical’ reason was prejudice. Thus Kant brought back into philosophy the appeal to something recognised as outside the sphere of theoretical rationality, which had been banished from the schools ever since the rise of scholasticism.

When it comes to mental superiority, every civilised nation can make out a plausible claim, which proves that all the claims are equally invalid. It is possible that the Jews are inferior to the Germans, but it is just as possible that the Germans are inferior to the Jews. The whole business of introducing pseudo-Darwinian jargon in such a question is utterly unscientific. Whatever we may come to know hereafter, we have not at present any good ground for wishing to encourage one race at the expense of another.

Communism is not democratic. What it calls the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is in fact the dictatorship of a small minority, who become an oligarchic governing class. All history shows that government is always conducted in the interests of the governing class, except in so far as it is influenced by fear of losing its power. This is the teaching, not only of history, but of Marx.

Fascism is not an ordered set of beliefs, like laisser-faire or Socialism or Communism; it is essentially an emotional protest, partly of those members of the middle class (such as small shopkeepers) who suffer from modern economic developments, partly of anarchic industrial magnates whose love of power has grown into megalomania. It is irrational, in the sense that it cannot achieve what its supporters desire; there is no philosophy of Fascism, but only a psycho-analysis. If it could succeed, the result would be widespread misery; but its inability to find a solution for the problem of war makes it impossible that it should succeed for more than a brief moment.

If we go back to the origins of Western civilisation, we find that what it has derived from Egypt and Babylonia is, in the main, characteristic of all civilisations and not specially distinctive of the West. The distinctive Western character begins with the Greeks, who invented the habit of deductive reasoning and the science of geometry. Their other merits were either not distinctive or lost in the Dark Ages. In literature and art they may have been supreme, but they did not differ very profoundly from various other ancient nations. In experimental science they produced a few men, notably Archimedes, who anticipated modern methods, but these men did not succeed in establishing a school or a tradition. The one prominent distinctive contribution of the Greeks to civilisation was deductive reasoning and pure mathematics.

The Jews first invented the notion that only one religion could be true, but they had no wish to convert all the world to it, and therefore only persecuted other Jews. The Christians, retaining the Judaic belief in a special revelation, added to it the Roman desire for worldwide dominion and the Greek taste for metaphysical subtleties. The combination produced the most fiercely persecuting religion that the world has yet known.

There is a great danger in the tendency to suppose that opposition to authority is essentially meritorious and that unconventional opinions are bound to be correct: no useful purpose is served by smashing lamp-posts or maintaining Shakespeare to be no poet. Yet this excessive rebelliousness is often the effect that too much authority has on spirited pupils.

No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.