Unpopular Essays — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell First published: 1950 Edition covered: George Allen & Unwin first edition, London, 1950 ("First published in 1950"), read in the full OCR text of the Digital Library of India scan (Internet Archive item in.ernet.dli.2015.462628). The table of contents was verified against two further independent sources: the Simon & Schuster New York 1950 edition (contents page reproduced on the Google Books record for the 2008 Read Books reprint) and the Routledge Classics edition (2009, ISBN 978-0-415-47370-5, 184 pp., table of contents recorded on Open Library). All three agree exactly: twelve numbered essays (I–XII), preceded by a Preface and a one-paragraph Acknowledgment. Because the book is an essay collection, the "chapters" are the essays in the order of the table of contents.

Central thesis

Unpopular Essays is a collection of twelve essays written over roughly fifteen years (the Preface says "written at various times during the last fifteen years") and assembled in 1950. The Preface states the purpose of the whole in one sentence: the essays are "concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Right or of the Left, which has hitherto characterized our tragic century." The book's enemy is not this or that creed but the intellectual style they share — the claim to certainty, held on authority rather than evidence, and enforced by coercion.

Across the twelve essays Russell builds a single diagnosis. Dogmatic certainty is at once an intellectual vice and a political catastrophe: it justifies persecution, war, and "ruthless cruelty" in the name of supposed truths about the future, and it is the mechanism by which governments manufacture "populations of fanatical lunatics." The cure is the habit of suspended judgment — holding opinions tentatively, as science does — which Russell identifies with the temper of liberal democracy itself. Philosophy, understood as the "love of wisdom" rather than as the dogmatic metaphysics he spends a whole essay ridiculing, is the best available discipline for learning that habit.

The same diagnosis carries a practical programme, most explicit in the political essays: the sovereign-state system cannot survive the atomic age; only a world government with a monopoly of armed force can end war; and such a government "will have to be imposed by force," preferably by an American-led alliance rather than by Soviet victory. Underneath the wit — and the book is deliberately witty, since "those who are solemn and pontifical are not to be successfully fought by being even more solemn and even more pontifical" — the essays argue that reason, tolerance, and the widening of human sympathy are the only alternatives to extinction.

How can men learn to hold opinions tentatively — without dogmatic certainty, on evidence, and with tolerance — in an age when cocksure creeds, armed with modern weapons, threaten to destroy mankind?

Chapter 1 — Philosophy and Politics

Central question

What is the actual historical and psychological connection between philosophical systems and political systems — and which philosophy, if any, justifies and sustains liberal democracy?

Main argument

The dangers of bad philosophy. The essay opens with a characteristic paradox: "The British are distinguished among the nations of modern Europe, on the one hand by the excellence of their philosophers, and on the other hand by their contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their wisdom." But systematic contempt for philosophy is itself a philosophy — the one called instrumentalism in America. Russell's claim is that "philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be dangerous, and therefore deserves that degree of negative respect which we accord to lightning and tigers."

The traditional synthesis. Historically, philosophy was the attempt to combine a doctrine of the universe with a practical ethic — "a synthesis of science and religion." Most philosophy has been "a reaction against scepticism": it arose when authority no longer sufficed to produce the socially necessary minimum of belief, so that "nominally rational arguments had to be invented." This motive, Russell says, "has led to a deep insincerity infecting most philosophy." The exceptions — Protagoras and Hume — were thorough-going sceptics and, tellingly, politically conservative.

Plato as totalitarian. The first great case is Plato. Democritus, the empiricist, materialist democrat, was the philosopher whose books Plato wanted burnt — and they were lost. Plato's Republic, Russell argues, is "a totalitarian tract": a rigid censorship of nursery stories, no Homer, no drama, state-manipulated eugenic lots, elaborate lies about biological inequality, and large-scale infanticide. "That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history." Plato's metaphysics of static perfection (from Parmenides) gave reactionary politics "an impersonal and disinterested appearance which deceived the world for ages"; his "disciples" Lenin and Hitler, Russell adds, supplied "a practical exegesis." He notes his agreement with Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Hegel and the recipe for progress. Russell then exhibits "the recipe for a philosophy of progress": decide what pleases you, select facts, announce a law of progress, and tell the public they must join the winning side. Hegel "set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound"; spelled out plainly, the Absolute Idea is "pure thought thinking about pure thought," and the dialectic's stages are mapped onto history in a way that leaves Germany very nearly "the realization of the Absolute Idea." Russell calls the system "a farrago of nonsense" yet notes its enormous success — most British and American philosophy teachers of his youth were Hegelians — and its "most curious" effect on Marx, who inherited the belief that history develops "according to a logical plan." The political upshot of the Hegelian metaphysic: "true liberty consists in obedience to an arbitrary authority... war is good."

Empiricism as the philosophy of democracy. "The only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy, and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind, is empiricism." Locke is its founder: "Both in intellectual and in practical matters he stood for order without authority; this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism." The essence of the Liberal outlook "lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively." Liberalism is "a recurrent product of commerce" (Ionia, Lombardy, Holland, England, and now the United States); a "fanatical belief in democracy" destroys democracy (Cromwell, Robespierre).

The ethics of uncertainty. Empiricism holds knowledge to be a matter of degree: "I am now convinced of the existence of Hengist, but very doubtful about Horsa." Its political consequence is a rule that runs through the whole book: "it is not worth while to inflict a comparatively certain present evil for the sake of a comparatively doubtful future good." If the Marxist eschatology were certain, "dictatorships, concentration camps, and world wars" would be justified; because it is not, present misery is decisive. "If it were certain that without Jews the world would be a paradise, there could be no valid objection to Auschwitz."

The verdict. We are again "in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an 'ideology'." Dogmatic systems buy social coherence at the price of persecution (Spain's Jews and Moors, France's Huguenots, Germany's atomic scientists), false belief, and violent hostility; "in every important war since 1700 the more democratic side has been victorious." Russell concludes: "empiricist liberalism (which is not incompatible with democratic socialism) is the only philosophy that can be adopted by a man who, on the one hand, demands some scientific evidence for his beliefs, and, on the other hand, desires human happiness more than the prevalence of this or that party or creed."

Key ideas

• Bad philosophy is practically dangerous: it "deserves that degree of negative respect which we accord to lightning and tigers."
• Most philosophy has been an insincere reaction against scepticism, inventing "nominally rational arguments" to defend authority and social coherence.
• Plato's Republic is "a totalitarian tract," and its metaphysical prestige — "literary snobbery" — concealed reactionary politics; Lenin and Hitler were its "disciples."
• Hegel's system is "a farrago of nonsense" whose obscurity concealed the deification of the State; Marx inherited its dialectic and its guarantee of victory.
• Empiricism, from Locke, is "the only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy"; its motto is "order without authority."
• "The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held" — tentatively, as in science.
• An uncertain hypothesis cannot justify a certain evil: "it is not worth while to inflict a comparatively certain present evil for the sake of a comparatively doubtful future good."
• Dogmatic systems produce social coherence but "involve persecution of valuable sections of the population" — and, since 1700, the more democratic side has won every important war.

Key takeaway

Philosophy is never politically neutral: dogmatic metaphysics underwrites tyranny, while empiricism — the theory that all beliefs are corrigible — is the intellectual foundation and temper of liberal democracy.

Chapter 2 — Philosophy for Laymen

Central question

Can philosophy, understood as "love of wisdom" rather than as a specialist discipline, teach ordinary citizens the suspended judgment they need in order to survive the powers that science and technique have put into their hands?

Main argument

Two kinds of problem. Civilized communities face two problems: mastering natural forces (science and technique) and "how best to utilize our command over the forces of nature." The second includes democracy versus dictatorship, capitalism versus socialism, "international government versus international anarchy," and on these "the laboratory can give no decisive guidance." History shows that "increase of skill has not, of itself, insured any increase of human happiness": agriculture brought the cult of human sacrifice; the tamed horse brought pillage and enslavement; cotton machinery killed Jefferson's emancipation movement, developed "child labour in England... to a point of appalling cruelty," and stimulated ruthless imperialism in Africa; science has now produced the atomic bomb, "and having produced it we are all terrified." Something more than skill is required — "something which may perhaps be called 'wisdom.'"

Philosophy and wisdom. "Philosophy" means "love of wisdom," and in this sense philosophy is what is needed. But the philosophy that belongs to general education is not the "philosophy of specialists" — not the theory of universals in Aquinas versus Duns Scotus, or the self-reference problems of language. Russell jokes that "Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know," adding that philosophical speculation (Anaximander's evolution, Democritus's atoms) has "shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge."

Questions science cannot answer. Do we survive death? Can mind dominate matter? Has the universe a purpose? Russell does not know the answers and does not believe anyone else does — "but I think human life would be impoverished if they were forgotten, or if definite answers were accepted without adequate evidence. To keep alive the interest in such questions, and to scrutinize suggested answers, is one of the functions of philosophy."

The demand for certainty. "The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice." Children at a picnic demand a dogmatic answer about the weather; later the same demand is met by prophets: "Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss. Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous. Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign." Dogmatism is "an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy," and "in the present age... it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness." The cure: "To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy."

Neither dogmatist nor sceptic. "While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless... What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance." Knowledge is a hierarchy of degrees of certainty — arithmetic at the top, memory below it (George IV "remembering" Waterloo), scientific laws in between. Acting on an uncertain hypothesis must be arranged so that error is not disastrous: argue with a Muggletonian but do not burn him, "because the evil of being burnt alive is more certain than any proposition of theology."

The intellectual virtues. Philosophy, like religion, should "advocate some way of life" — but without appeal to authority, without a Church (Comte tried and failed), and with more stress on the intellectual virtues. These are: truthfulness ("a man imbued with the philosophic spirit... will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them," applying "solvent criticism" especially to the beliefs he finds it "most painful to doubt"); and generality or impartiality — the A, B, C exercise of stripping proper names out of political opinions. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" inculcates emotional generality; "ethical statements should not contain proper names" inculcates logical generality; "they are scarcely distinguishable in practical import."

What philosophy gives. To the student it gives "a habit of exact and careful thought," "an impersonal breadth and scope to the conception of the ends of life," a just measure of self, and — by enlarging the objects of thought — "an antidote to the anxieties and anguish of the present, and makes possible the nearest approach to serenity that is available to a sensitive mind in our tortured and uncertain world."

Key ideas

• "Increase of skill has not, of itself, insured any increase of human happiness"; what is missing is "something which may perhaps be called 'wisdom.'"
• "Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know" — yet philosophical speculation is "a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge."
• Philosophy's function is to keep alive the great questions science cannot answer and to scrutinize proposed answers.
• "The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice."
• Dogmatism is "an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy" — the slogans "Liquidate the capitalists... Exterminate the Jews... Kill the Croats" show what a modicum of philosophy would prevent.
• "While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless": the aim is to dissipate certainty, not to prove ignorance.
• An uncertain hypothesis cannot justify a certain evil — burning a Muggletonian is a worse bet than arguing with him.
• The intellectual virtues — truthfulness, impartiality, generality — make philosophy the practical heir of religion without its authority.

Key takeaway

Philosophy's civilizing gift is not a set of answers but the discipline of suspended judgment — the only reliable defence against the cocksure prophets who would lead populations into the Promised Land and the abyss.

Chapter 3 — The Future of Mankind

Central question

Given the atomic bomb and the Soviet-American confrontation, can the familiar system of sovereign states continue — and if not, what must replace it?

Main argument

Three possibilities. "Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realized": (1) the end of human life on our planet; (2) a reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population; (3) a unification of the world under a single government "possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war." Russell does not pretend to know which will happen: "What I do contend, without any hesitation, is that the kind of system to which we have been accustomed cannot possibly continue."

Extinction and barbarism. Extinction might come through radioactive clouds after a postponed but indecisive next world war; Russell notes the "rhetoric with a bogus air of heroism" of those who say they would prefer the end of man to submission to the Soviet Government. Barbarism is more probable: destroyed laboratories and libraries, famine, bacteriological warfare, and then prophets telling "the maddened populations that their ills were wholly due to science." "Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery."

World government by force. World government "might be realized in various ways": by American victory, Soviet victory, agreement, or — "the most hopeful" — an alliance of nations desiring international government becoming so strong that Russia no longer dares to stand out. But "the mutual suspicions between Russia and the West make it idle to hope, in any near future, for any genuine agreement"; any pretended universal authority "is bound to be a sham, like U.N.O." Russell's conclusion is blunt: "I think we should admit that a world government will have to be imposed by force. I am sure that force, or the threat of force, will be necessary. I hope the threat of force may suffice, but, if not, actual force should be employed."

America or Russia. "A world empire of either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. is therefore preferable to the results of a continuation of the present international anarchy." But there are "important reasons for preferring a victory of America" — not capitalism over communism, but freedom of thought, inquiry, discussion, and "humane feeling." A Russian victory, he argues, would mean what Poland shows: universities destroyed, education reduced to "glib repetition of correct shibboleths," the middle class annihilated, science subjected to Lysenko, and "Stalin at all times knows the truth about metaphysics." An American-led victory would preserve British, French, Italian, and German cultures. And an oligarchy that controls all publicity can maintain "a greater degree of economic inequality than exists in Great Britain, or even in America": "Only democracy and free publicity can prevent the holders of power from establishing a servile state."

The policy. The first step is to persuade the United States and the British Commonwealth of "the absolute necessity for a military unification of the world"; then offer all other nations entry into a firm alliance, with inducements for hesitant ones; then threaten any Great Power refusing to join with outlawry. A war, if it came "fairly soon," would probably leave the American economic and political structure intact; if the Alliance were powerful enough, war might be unnecessary.

The hope. "From the break-up of the Roman Empire to the present day, states have almost continuously increased in size. There are now only two fully independent states, America and Russia. The next step in this long historical process should reduce the two to one, and thus put an end to the period of organized wars, which began in Egypt some 6,000 years ago." The nineteenth century increased the numbers of homo sapiens; "in the twentieth century they have, so far, pursued the exactly opposite aim." If war were removed, "scientific technique could at last be used to promote human happiness": "There is no longer any technical reason for the persistence of poverty, even in such densely populated countries as India and China." Liberty is "not an absolute good": murderous states must be restrained as murderers are. "What the world most needs is effective laws to control international relations," with a single armed force, "like a municipal police force," as the sanction behind them.

Key ideas

• Only three futures are possible — extinction, barbarism, or world government with a monopoly of armed force — and "the kind of system to which we have been accustomed cannot possibly continue."
• "I think we should admit that a world government will have to be imposed by force": agreement is impossible while Soviet suspicion vetoes even atomic inspection; U.N.O. is "a sham."
• "A world empire of either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. is therefore preferable to the results of a continuation of the present international anarchy."
• A Russian victory would be "an appalling disaster": Poland shows education reduced to "glib repetition of correct shibboleths," with science and philosophy as "sycophantic adjuncts of government."
• "Only democracy and free publicity can prevent the holders of power from establishing a servile state" — liberty matters to non-intellectuals too.
• "Liberty must be limited by law, and its most valuable forms can only exist within a framework of law."
• "There is no longer any technical reason for the persistence of poverty, even in such densely populated countries as India and China."
• The nineteenth century increased the numbers of mankind; the twentieth "has, so far, pursued the exactly opposite aim."

Key takeaway

The sovereign-state system is obsolete: only a world government with a monopoly of armed force can end war, and its establishment — by an American-led alliance, by force or the threat of force — is the price of human survival.

Chapter 4 — Philosophy's Ulterior Motives

Central question

Why does philosophy, supposedly the pursuit of wisdom, so consistently produce bad arguments — and what hidden desires do those arguments serve?

Main argument

The temperament of the philosopher. The essay opens with F. H. Bradley's dictum that metaphysics is "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." Russell proposes instead: "an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously." The philosophical temperament is rare because it combines "a strong desire to believe some general proposition about the universe or human life" with an "inability to believe contentedly except on what appear to be intellectual grounds." Hence "the more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be... That is why philosophy is obscure." The typical philosopher's reasoning contains "a momentary lack of vigilance [that] allows a fallacy to pass undetected."

Case studies in bias. Descartes: his initial scepticism was genuine, but from the cogito onward "all intellectual caution is thrown to the winds" — he accepts the scholastic maxims, proves God's existence and goodness, and so rescues mathematics. "His system, psychologically, was as follows: No God, no geometry; but geometry is delicious; therefore God exists." Leibniz: "He made his living by writing the annals of the House of Hanover, and his reputation by bad philosophy" — his good philosophy he left unpublished, as it would have cost him his pensions; the Theodicee, written for Queen Sophie Charlotte, defends the best of all possible worlds "in the authentic style of Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss," and its free-will problem dissolves into "a diffuse muddle." Berkeley: he attacked matter to prove God; "his contentions have never been answered," but he flinched from the sceptical consequence (the tree in the Quad exists only in the mind of God — illustrated by Ronald Knox's limerick and its reply), and "the same timidity... has been shown by all his followers, except Hume." Hume, "the enfant terrible of philosophy, was peculiar in having no metaphysical ulterior motives."

Kant and the two desires. Hume "awakened [Kant] from his dogmatic slumbers"; after twelve years came the Critique of Pure Reason, and "seven years later... he resumed his dogmatic slumbers." Kant's "fundamental desires were two: he wanted to be sure of an invariable routine, and he wanted to believe the moral maxims that he had learned in his infancy." The green-spectacles argument saves causality for phenomena; the categorical imperative — "a premiss, of course, needs a disguise" — restores free will, a future life, and God. "So Kant died happy, and has been honoured ever since; his doctrine has even been proclaimed the official philosophy of the Nazi State."

Hegel and Marx. "Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected." Hegel made logic and history identical: the dialectic runs from Pure Being (China, "of which Hegel knew only that it had existed") to the Absolute Idea (the Prussian State, "which had given Hegel a professorship at Berlin"). The system "satisfied the instincts of philosophers more fully than any of its predecessors": obscure, optimistic, and flattering — the philosopher "sitting in his study considering abstract ideas, can know more about the real world than the statesman." (Russell notes the contretemps of Hegel's proof that there must be exactly seven planets, published a week before the eighth was found.) "One last great system has arisen from Hegel's ashes": Marx. "To Hegel... it was possible to regard the Prussian State as the goal; but to Marx, poor, ill, and in exile, it was obvious that the world is not yet perfect. One more turn of the dialectical wheel — that is to say, one more revolution — is necessary before the attainment of the millennium." The Hegelian element "contributes the certainty of victory and the feeling of being on the side of irresistible cosmic forces": "Emotionally, belief in Hegelian dialectic... is analogous to the Christian belief in the Second Coming; but its supposed logical basis gives it a hold on the head as well as the heart."

The diagnosis. "Philosophy is a stage in intellectual development, and is not compatible with mental maturity." Metaphysicians, "like savages," imagine "a magical connection between words and things": "Sentences have subjects and predicates, therefore the world consists of substances with attributes." A second source of the belief in pure thought is "the conviction that the world must be ethically satisfying" — Dr. Pangloss in his study, or Bernard Bosanquet reasoning in his Logic that "it would be hard to believe... in the likelihood of a catastrophe which should overwhelm a progressive civilization like that of modern Europe." "Philosophy, as opposed to science, springs from a kind of self-assertion: a belief that our purposes have an important relation to the purposes of the universe." Science has abandoned that optimism "but is being led towards another: that we, by our intelligence, can make the world such as to satisfy a large proportion of our desires. This is a practical, as opposed to a metaphysical, optimism. I hope it will not seem to future generations as foolish as that of Dr. Pangloss."

Key ideas

• "The more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be... That is why philosophy is obscure."
• The philosopher's temperament couples a strong desire to believe with the need for intellectual grounds; "a momentary lack of vigilance allows a fallacy to pass undetected."
• Descartes: "No God, no geometry; but geometry is delicious; therefore God exists."
• Leibniz made "his living by writing the annals of the House of Hanover, and his reputation by bad philosophy"; his Theodicee is Panglossian apologetics.
• Berkeley's arguments against matter "have never been answered," but he — and all his followers "except Hume" — flinched from their sceptical consequences.
• Kant's two desires were "an invariable routine" and his childhood moral maxims; the categorical imperative is the childhood premiss "introduced to philosophical society under a disguise."
• Hegel's dialectic is history rewritten so that the Prussian State is the goal; Marx's dialectic gives the proletariat "the certainty of victory" — "a hold on the head as well as the heart."
• Metaphysics confuses syntax with world structure, and philosophy "springs from a kind of self-assertion"; science's "practical optimism" is the honest alternative to Dr. Pangloss.

Key takeaway

Systematic philosophy is driven by ulterior emotional motives — the desire for certainty, cosmic comfort, and self-importance — which is why its arguments are so often magnificent fallacies; science's practical optimism, which tests the world instead of decreeing it, is the honest alternative.

Chapter 5 — The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed

Central question

Why do the powerful so readily attribute a special moral excellence to the oppressed — and what does this flattering myth actually do?

Main argument

The delusion of group virtue. "One of the persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others." Direct self-esteem praises one's own group; among writers and moralists there is a subtler form — thinking well of the groups to which one does not belong: Lao-Tze admired "the pure men of old," Tacitus and Madame de Staël admired the Germans, Locke admired "the intelligent American."

The noble savage and the oppressed nations. The eighteenth century, while conquering America, reducing the peasantry, and introducing the cruelties of early industrialism, "loved to sentimentalize about the 'noble savage' and the 'simple annals of the poor'" — Pope praising the man whose "few paternal acres" bound his wish, while preferring London and Twickenham for himself. After the French Revolution the poor became the "mob" or the "rabble" to reactionaries, while Liberals idealized the rural poor and Socialists and Communists the urban proletariat. Nationalism supplied "a substitute for the noble savage — the patriot of an oppressed nation": the Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Poles were "afflicted poetic races, too idealistic to succeed in this wicked world"; the Irish had "a special charm and mystical insight until 1916." "One by one these various nations rose to independence, and were found to be just like everybody else."

Women, children, and the cycle of idealization. Women "have been viewed even more irrationally than the poor or the subject nations": Eve and the Virgin, the Victorian combination of "the Madonna and the lady of chivalry" — "she enjoyed a spiritual nature, which made her the superior of man but unfitted her for business or politics." A schoolmasters' pamphlet of Russell's day ("We gladly place her first as a spiritual force... a holy spiritual crusade") shows the survival of the doctrine. "The belief in their 'spiritual' superiority was part and parcel of the determination to keep them inferior economically and politically." Children moved from theological wickedness (Dr. Watts: "One stroke of His almighty rod can send young sinners quick to Hell") through Wordsworth's "trailing clouds of glory" to the modern "scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious": "Is all this the objective truth at last? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to walop the little pests?"

The mechanism. "The stage in which superior virtue is attributed to the oppressed is transient and unstable. It begins only when the oppressors come to have a bad conscience, and this only happens when their power is no longer secure." The idealization is useful: "if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue." But the myth is self-destructing — "sooner or later the oppressed class will argue that its superior virtue is a reason in favour of its having power, and the oppressors will find their own weapons turned against them. When at last power has been equalized, it becomes apparent to everybody that all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense."

The proletariat. The cycle is still running its course "in the case which is of the most importance at the present time — namely, that of the proletariat." Admiration of the proletariat "is part of the ideology of the machine age" — "as little in its favour as belief in Celtic magic, the Slav soul, women's intuition, and children's innocence." If oppression really produced virtue, "the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse." The epigram closes the essay: "Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come."

Key ideas

• Belief in the moral excellence of whole groups is a form of indirect self-esteem: writers admire the groups to which they do not belong.
• The noble savage, the "afflicted poetic" nation, the "angelic" woman, and the innocent child were each idealized by those who held power over them.
• The Victorian ideal of woman — "the superior of man but unfitted for business or politics" — was "part and parcel of the determination to keep them inferior economically and politically."
• Children have been "limbs of Satan" (Dr. Watts), Wordsworthian angels, and now "scientific Freudian abominations" — a shifting adult projection, not objective truth.
• Idealization begins "only when the oppressors come to have a bad conscience, and this only happens when their power is no longer secure."
• The myth turns against its makers: the oppressed claim power on the strength of their "virtue," and after equality "all the talk about superior virtue was nonsense."
• If oppression produced virtue, "the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse."
• "Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come."

Key takeaway

The doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed is a flattering rationalization of inequality that appears when power begins to waver — and dissolves the moment equality is actually achieved.

Chapter 6 — On Being Modern-minded

Central question

What is the intellectual and moral cost of the modern obsession with being up to date?

Main argument

Chronological parochialism. "Our age is the most parochial since Homer" — not geographically ("the inhabitants of Mudcombe-in-the-Meer are more aware than at any former time of what is being done and thought at Praha, at Gorki, or at Peiping") but chronologically: "as the new names conceal the historic cities of Prague, Nijni-Novgorod, and Pekin, so new catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors." The modern reader feels Hamlet must be "translated into the language of Marx or of Freud" to be interesting; a reviewer condemned an essay on Hamlet as "dated, in every sense, 1908" — "It did not occur to the reviewer that his review was 'dated, in every sense, 1936.' He was writing for the moment, not for all time."

Fashion as a substitute for thought. The desire to be contemporary is old (the Renaissance despised the Gothic centuries; the Romantics despised the heroic couplet), "but in none of these former times was the contempt for the past nearly as complete as it is now." Fashionable opinion "has great advantages. It makes thought unnecessary and puts the highest intelligence within the reach of everyone": learn the correct use of "complex," "sadism," "Oedipus," "bourgeois," "deviation," "left," and nothing more is needed for a brilliant writer. "Some, at least, of such words represented much thought on the part of their inventors; like paper money they were originally convertible into gold. But they have become for most people inconvertible."

The modern-minded man. "The modern-minded man, although he believes profoundly in the wisdom of his period, must be presumed to be very modest about his personal powers. His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought... he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours... but only to be slightly ahead of others in point of time. Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd." A mentally solitary life — Copernicus's, Spinoza's, Milton's after the Restoration — "seems pointless according to modern standards." The pressures are real: money rewards and ephemeral fame; the rapidity of progress ("Newton lasted till Einstein; Einstein is already regarded by many as antiquated"); public events impinging on private life; Spinoza today "would in all likelihood have been conscripted or put in prison."

The deeper cause: the lost standards. "In former days men wished to serve God." When belief in God decayed, "there still remained the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Non-human standards were still laid up in heaven." In the nineteenth century the earnest atheists' very earnestness undid these: "Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by the artists in a revolt against the sugary insipidities of a philistine epoch." The result: "the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God's essence as an ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance; while the individual... was left without any inner defence against social pressure."

The paradox. "All movements go too far, and this is certainly true of the movement toward subjectivity, which began with Luther and Descartes as an assertion of the individual and has culminated by an inherent logic in his complete subjection." Detachment and objectivity are "historically but not logically associated with certain traditional beliefs; to preserve them without these beliefs is both possible and important." The final sentence is the essay's thesis: "We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude."

Key ideas

• "Our age is the most parochial since Homer" — parochial in the chronological sense, dismissing everything earlier than the latest catchword.
• The modern reader demands that Hamlet be "translated into the language of Marx or of Freud"; the reviewer's "dated, in every sense, 1908" was itself "dated, in every sense, 1936."
• Fashionable jargon makes "thought unnecessary": catchwords are "paper money" no longer "convertible into gold."
• The modern-minded man suppresses what is individual in himself, hoping only "to be slightly ahead of others in point of time."
• The solitary life — Copernicus, Spinoza, Milton — "seems pointless according to modern standards," and the modern world makes it nearly impossible.
• Pragmatism, the history of morals, and the artists destroyed the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, leaving the individual "without any inner defence against social pressure."
• The movement toward subjectivity "began with Luther and Descartes as an assertion of the individual and has culminated by an inherent logic in his complete subjection."
• "We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude."

Key takeaway

The worship of novelty is a form of servitude: the modern-minded man trades his independence for the admiration of the herd, and what he has really lost is not belief but solitude.

Chapter 7 — An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

Central question

Given that man is not in fact a rational animal, what are the sources of our false beliefs — and what rules can protect us from silly error?

Main argument

"Man is a rational animal." The essay opens with the book's most famous lines: "Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents." Aristotle's original evidence was that "some people can do sums" — but "calculating machines do sums better than even the cleverest people, yet no one contends that these useful instruments are immortal." Erasmus is the model: "folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived."

The clergy in the Ages of Faith. Russell begins the catalogue with the clergy, "whom all right-thinking people acknowledge to be the wisest as well as the best of men." The Ages of Faith, "which are praised by our neo-scholastics, were the time when the clergy had things all their own way": witches burnt, devils settling on food, sneezing as the soul escaping (hence "bless you"). After the rise of science the clergy fought a losing battle — lightning rods condemned as impious (Dr. Price of Boston found the Massachusetts earthquakes to be God's wrath at Franklin's "iron points"; Gandhi warned Indians that earthquakes punished their sins); a Scottish clergyman in 1916 blamed military failure on potatoes planted on the Sabbath; Toplady thanked God when his former vicarage burnt down.

The logic of sin. The whole conception of "Sin" is puzzling: "sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering" — the euthanasia bill rejected by the Lords to please the Archbishop of Canterbury, so that "victims of cancer still have to endure months of wholly useless agony." The Pope refuses to support the SPCA because animals have no souls; the Church forbids marrying your deceased wife's sister. Resurrection of the body produces the calculation of the world's end, Aquinas's cannibal problem, and the objection to cremation ("it is surely blasphemous to suppose such a work impossible for the Deity"). The sex doctrine (St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas) makes venereal disease "God's punishment," and "the phrase 'in the sight of God' puzzles me... He does not see Reno." Logical difficulties abound: if God is omnipotent, "when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen"; Spinoza's contemporaries asked if Nero's murder of his mother was good; the Gnostics held the Old Testament to be the work of an evil spirit. "As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles" — and in practice people "choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like" ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is now passed over in silence).

The causes of belief. "We believe, first and foremost, what makes us feel that we are fine fellows" — Mr. Homo's country is superior (Shakespeare and Milton, or French cookery, or Yugoslavia's pigs, or Monaco's gambling); man alone among animals has an immortal soul and "has learnt the multiplication table"; rabbits' white tails were made for sportsmen; the seasons were always spring before the Fall. "Self-importance, individual or generic, is the source of most of our religious beliefs" — Borrow's melancholy Welsh preacher was cured when told he was only one of many who had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Evolution's glorification of man is even more ridiculous: "At last, in the fulness of time, He produced Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini." The earth will grow cold or the sun will burst (Sir James Jeans); "The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system."

Love of the marvellous. A conjuror's audiences wrote down "something much more astonishing than the reality"; rumours improve in transit; Shakespeare found his Caesar-prodigies in reputable historians; "even so recently as 1914 the 'angels of Mons' encouraged the British troops"; in September 1914 "almost everybody in England believed that Russian troops had passed through England" — "Everybody knew somebody who had seen them, though no one had seen them himself." The myth-making faculty is "often allied with cruelty": the Jews accused of ritual murder — "There is not an iota of evidence... the unfounded belief in them is evidence of the unconscious desire to find some victim to persecute."

Medicine, race, and blood. Insanity was treated by beating devils out of patients (George III included); "almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient"; anaesthetics were opposed until Adam's rib licensed them for men. The fallacies about "race" and "blood" "have no objective justification; they are believed solely because they minister to self-esteem and to the impulse towards cruelty": Cyrus's kingly bearing, "blood will tell," the American Red Cross's segregated plasma, Haiti's white Satan, Aristotle on Greek slavery, the Nazis' Nordic myth ("if you did not love Hitler, that was proof of tainted blood"), and the purest living races being the Pygmies, Hottentots, and Australian aborigines — "The ancient Greeks... were the most civilized, [and] also the most mixed." Blood taboos extend to mourning, the mark of Cain, and the churching of women. In Russia the same absurdity takes economic form: "proletarian" came to mean supporter of the government, "kulak" any peasant opposing collectivization.

Economic and political superstitions. Gold and gems were valued for "supposed magical properties": the reparations of 1919 demanded payment in money rather than goods, so "the great depression was the direct result of the surviving belief in the magical properties of gold." "Human nature cannot be changed" is "certainly false" as used: the Tibetans' polyandry, infanticide "almost universal before the rise of Christianity," the Moscow housing shortage making men fight for paternity — "adult 'human nature' is extremely variable, according to the circumstances of education." Hence: "There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." Plato admitted his Republic rested on an absurd myth; Hobbes cited transubstantiation. "Give me an adequate army... and I will undertake, within 30 years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold." Such beliefs would become "Sunday truths, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life." "The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes." The pernicious corollary is the "dogmatic assertion that there will always be wars": "Sweden has had no war since 1814, but the Swedes are one of the happiest and most contented nations in the world... Exactly the same arguments... were formerly used in defence of duelling."

The dangers of nonconformity. "But if conformity has its dangers, so has nonconformity... any one who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion": the faith-healing electrical engineer (later imprisoned for fraud), the lunacy doctor's new logic, and the man who said "Because I am Julius Caesar." "You cannot make sure of being right by being eccentric."

Psychology and punishment. Science's hardest battle is psychology: beaten boys get worse, exhibitionists are jailed "over and over again" instead of being cured by "trousers that button up the back" — because punishment "satisfies people's vindictive impulses." "Broadly speaking, punishment is likely to prevent crimes that are sane in origin, but not those that spring from some psychological abnormality." On Germany after 1945: "we should have been more likely to prevent a repetition of German aggression if we had regarded the rank and file of the Nazis as we regard lunatics... Those who are being punished seldom learn to feel kindly towards the men who punish them."

Rules against silly error. "To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error":

• If a matter can be settled by observation, observe: "Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted."
• Anger is a test of bias: "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do... Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion."
• Travel, or read the other party's newspaper: "In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong" (the Manchus and Chinese each adopted the other's foolish custom).
• Imagine an argument with a person of different bias — Gandhi against railways — "I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue."
• "Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem": "If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals."

Fear. "Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear." Fear invents rumours of disaster and comforts (heaven for ourselves, hell for our enemies). "Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." The two ways of avoiding fear are immunity-beliefs (magic, talismans, mascots) and courage. Religion has tried both: Plato's State enforces cheerful views of the next world "to make soldiers more willing to die in battle"; orthodox salvation had definite rules; the Stoics and Spinoza escaped fear "by pretending that such things as physical suffering are not really evil... still based upon false belief." Under great fear everybody becomes superstitious — Jonah's sailors, the Japanese massacring Koreans after the Tokyo earthquake, the Carthaginians sacrificing aristocratic children to Moloch — and "collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd." "Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear... Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death."

Lighter rubbish. Some superstitions "add to the gaiety of life": a letter from Osiris (with telephone number, in a Boston suburb), self-proclaimed Messiahs, the sect that celebrated communion in whisky during Prohibition, the English as the lost ten tribes, the Great Pyramid's accurate predictions "up to the date of publication of the book in question," and the prophetess of a Northern New York lake who declined to walk on water once all believed she could: "In that case... there is no need for me to do so." The essay ends: "A wise man will enjoy the goods of which there is a plentiful supply, and of intellectual rubbish he will find an abundant diet, in our own age as in every other."

Key ideas

• "Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it."
• The Ages of Faith show that clerical power was greatest when belief was most absurd — from lightning rods and earthquakes to the sin of euthanasia and the Peeping-Tom Deity of the nuns' bathrobes.
• "Self-importance, individual or generic, is the source of most of our religious beliefs"; even the glorification of evolution climaxes in "Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini."
• Racial doctrine is "a myth generated by the overweening self-esteem of the holders of power"; "there is not in Europe any such thing as a pure race," and the purest races are not the bearers of culture.
• "There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action" — with an army, Russell could make the world believe two and two are three.
• Error is driven by self-esteem, love of the marvellous, envy, and fear: "To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
• Simple rules guard against silly error: observe (Mrs. Aristotle's teeth), suspect anger as a sign of bias ("Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic"), travel in mind or body, and "be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem."
• "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

Key takeaway

Most human belief is intellectual rubbish generated by self-esteem, fear, and the love of the marvellous — but silly error can be avoided by a few simple disciplines: observation, suspicion of flattering opinions, and the conquest of fear.

Chapter 8 — The Functions of a Teacher

Central question

What are teachers for — and how can they perform their function in states that want education to serve propaganda?

Main argument

The transformation of the profession. "Teaching, more even than most other professions, has been transformed during the last hundred years from a small, highly skilled profession... to a large and important branch of the public service." The modern teacher who follows the ancient ideal "is likely to be made sharply aware that it is not his function to teach what he thinks, but to instill such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful by his employers." In antiquity teachers were unorganized and uncontrolled (Socrates was put to death and Plato imprisoned, "but such incidents did not interfere with the spread of their doctrines"); the medieval Church made teaching its "exclusive prerogative, with the result that there was little progress either intellectual or social"; the Renaissance returned freedom (the Inquisition made Galileo recant and burnt Bruno — "but each of these men had done his work before being punished"). "In England, especially, until near the end of the nineteenth century, hardly any men of first-rate eminence except Newton were connected with universities."

The teacher as civil servant. State education "is obviously necessary, but as obviously involves certain dangers." The evils "were seen in their full magnitude in Nazi Germany and are still seen in Russia": the teacher must subscribe to a creed, "must condone abominations and carefully abstain from speaking his mind on current events," and beyond the elements "is obliged to take the official view on all controversial questions." The result: "fanatical bigots, ignorant of the world outside their own country." The decay of cultural internationalism is part of the same story — the Leningrad professor of pure mathematics who once attended international congresses, now confined; teaching posts filled by nationality rather than competence.

The defence of the state and the defence of freedom. Russell agrees with the governments of the world that "the imparting of definite uncontroversial information is one of the least of the teacher's functions" — though it is the basis of the rest. "The defence of the state in all civilized countries is quite as much in the hands of teachers as in those of the armed forces," and criticism is only justified "if the state is defended by obscurantism and appeal to irrational passion." The dogmatists' belief that freedom leads to error is refuted by history: "Nations have been brought to ruin much more often by insistence upon a narrow-minded doctrinal uniformity than by free discussion and the toleration of divergent opinions" — and "in every important war since the year 1700 the victory has gone to the more democratic side." Dogmatism leads to one of two misfortunes: one set of dogmatists conquers the world, "or, what is worse, rival dogmatists conquer different regions and preach the gospel of hate against each other. The first makes civilization static, the second tends to destroy it completely. Against both, the teacher should be the main safeguard."

The teacher as guardian of civilization. Teachers should stand outside the strife of parties and instill "the habit of impartial inquiry"; "The teacher should not be expected to flatter the prejudices either of the mob or of officials." Civilization is not machinery, motor cars, and bathrooms: "Civilization, in the more important sense, is a thing of the mind." It requires knowledge — "a man should be aware of the minuteness of himself and his immediate environment in relation to the world in time and space," his country as "one among the countries of the world," his age as one among the ages — and enlarged emotions: admiration for those inspired by "love of mankind," "supreme intellect," and "exceptional sensitiveness" in creating beauty. "The civilized man, where he cannot admire, will aim rather at understanding than at reprobating. He will seek rather to discover and remove the impersonal causes of evil than to hate the men who are in its grip."

Teacher versus propagandist. No man can be a good teacher without "feelings of warm affection towards his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself believes to be of value." The propagandist "desires, like a topiary artist, that their growth shall be trained and twisted to suit the gardener's purpose. And in thwarting their natural growth he is apt to destroy in them all generous vigour, replacing it by envy, destructiveness, and cruelty." Russell's claim is psychological: "most cruelty results from thwarting in early years, above all from thwarting what is good"; "Repressive and persecuting passions... are not an inevitable part of human nature... they are, I believe, always the outcome of some kind of unhappiness." Hence the educator's aim is adults who do not need "to rob others of happiness because they themselves have not been robbed of it."

The obstacles. Teachers are overworked and harnessed to examinations; in most countries "certain opinions are recognized as correct, and others as dangerous," so that "the mentioning of correct opinions is considered to be merely sound instruction" while anything else is propaganda — American civics being "a sort of copybook account of how public affairs are supposed to be conducted." "The idea that falsehood is edifying is one of the besetting sins of those who draw up educational schemes"; "to tell lies to the young, who have no means of checking what they are told, is morally indefensible." Above all the teacher should produce "the kind of tolerance that springs from an endeavour to understand those who are different from ourselves" — "Ants and savages put strangers to death."

The remedy: professional freedom. "It is they who know most intimately the needs of the young... But it is not they who decide what shall be taught." "The teacher is a kind of medical man whose purpose is to cure the patient of childishness, but he is not allowed to decide for himself on the basis of experience what methods are most suitable to this end." "The only way to prevent totalitarianism in our highly organized world is to secure a certain degree of independence for bodies performing useful, public work, and among such bodies teachers deserve a foremost place." The closing warning: "Every system should allow loopholes and exceptions, for if it does not it will in the end crush all that is best in man."

Key ideas

• Modern teaching has become a public service whose employees are expected "to instill such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful by their employers."
• Imparting uncontroversial information is "one of the least of the teacher's functions"; the higher function is forming the habit of impartial inquiry.
• "Nations have been brought to ruin much more often by insistence upon a narrow-minded doctrinal uniformity than by free discussion" — and since 1700 the more democratic side has won every important war.
• "Teachers are more than any other class the guardians of civilization" — civilization being "a thing of the mind," not of bathrooms and motor cars.
• The propagandist treats pupils as "potential soldiers in an army," shaping them "like a topiary artist"; cruelty is the fruit of thwarted growth.
• "The idea that falsehood is edifying is one of the besetting sins of those who draw up educational schemes"; lying to the young is "morally indefensible."
• The teacher's supreme product, if democracy is to survive, is "the kind of tolerance that springs from an endeavour to understand those who are different from ourselves."
• "The only way to prevent totalitarianism in our highly organized world is to secure a certain degree of independence for bodies performing useful, public work."

Key takeaway

Because teachers are the guardians of civilization, their professional freedom is the chief safeguard against totalitarianism — the state that turns education into propaganda destroys the habits of mind on which democracy depends.

Chapter 9 — Ideas That Have Helped Mankind

Central question

Which ideas, technical and moral, have actually improved the human lot — and what is the one idea still needed?

Main argument

What counts as help? Russell lists the candidates: more numerous populations; becoming "less like animals" (acquired skills and forethought dominating impulse); happiness — doubtful, since "I do not think that the learned men of my acquaintance, even when they enjoy a secure income, are as happy as the mice that eat the crumbs from their tables"; diversity of enjoyments — real (lions get no pleasure from a movie, and man's reward is "a much greater liability to boredom"); knowledge; and friendliness — real within the herd (English robins peck an elderly robin to death, whereas English men give an elderly man an old-age pension) but "as ferocious as those of any animal" towards those outside it.

The technical ideas. The most important steps came before history: language; fire (the child scolded for throwing the meat into the fire, "but when it was taken out it was found to be much better, and so the long history of cookery began"); the domestication of animals (Russell likes the theory that men tamed whatever their religion taught them to worship — "The tribes that worshipped lions and crocodiles died out, while those to whom the cow or the sheep was a sacred animal prospered"); agriculture — which "introduced bloodthirsty practices into religion" (Moloch's children; the Manchester Evangelicals' six-year-olds working twelve to fourteen hours a day), until it was discovered that "grain will grow, and cotton goods can be manufactured, without being watered by the blood of infants"; and writing, "which was indeed a pre-requisite of history."

The Greeks and the seventeenth century. Mathematics and astronomy came from Babylonia but were stereotyped; "it is to the Greeks that we owe ways of thinking and investigating that have ever since been found fruitful" — Xenophanes' observation that men make gods in their own image, the discovery that the earth is round, Aristarchus's Copernican hypothesis, and "the conception of natural law... expressed in mathematical terms." But Aristotle misled the world with the idea of purpose: of his four causes, the "final" cause is the purpose, and "where inanimate nature is concerned, only 'efficient' causes have been found scientifically discoverable, and the attempt to explain phenomena by 'final' causes has always led to bad science" (the inn on the mountain pass illustrates the distinction). The seventeenth century — Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz — made "an advance... more sudden and surprising than any other in history, except that of the early Greeks." The law of inertia unified earth and heavens: the scholastics' sublunary world of decay and celestial world of the Unmoved Mover was replaced by one physics — "and thus laid the foundations of the purely materialistic physics in which men of science, however pious, have ever since believed." Science had to discard "every kind of ethical and aesthetic bias": the Greeks made the circle's perfection a law of the heavens, and Anaxagoras was prosecuted for impiety.

Evolution and the soul. Geology, Darwin, and evolution first upset the faith of British men of science: "At what moment in evolution did our ancestors acquire free will?... Was it really he [Pithecanthropus] who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekinensis?... Perhaps then it was the Neanderthal men who first sinned? This seems the more likely, as they lived in Germany." The "grand" conception that proved scientifically useless is the soul: "I do not mean that there is positive evidence showing that men have no souls; I only mean that the soul, if it exists, plays no part in any discoverable causal law." Behaviour can be studied (rats in mazes; "men in barbed wire cages"; "you can turn a male rat into a female, though so far nothing analogous has been done with human beings, even at Buchenwald"); "the conception of sin has thus come to seem quite unscientific, except, of course, as applied to the Nazis."

Technique without morality. "Scientific progress without a corresponding, moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about." Russell indulges the Tower of Babel fancy — perhaps God will let the nuclear physicists "carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race" — and imagines the precipitating causes: "Perhaps it will be a dispute about Persian oil, perhaps a disagreement as to Chinese trade, perhaps a quarrel between Jews and Mohammedans for the control of Palestine. Any patriotic person can see that these issues are of such importance as to make the extermination of mankind preferable to cowardly conciliation."

The moral ideas. Man, "viewed morally, is a strange amalgam of angel and devil": capable of "universal love," yet capable of Auschwitz, of the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians, and of enjoying "juicy steaks and... hot rolls while German children die of hunger." The brotherhood of man owed its force to politics: Alexander's policy of mixing Greek and barbarian, then the Stoics — "It was the Stoics who invented the conception of the brotherhood of man" — then Christianity ("Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; the parable of the Good Samaritan, which the hearer should understand by substituting "German" or "Japanese" for "Samaritan"), and the Buddhists ("the Buddha declared that he could not be happy so long as even one man remained miserable"). The ethical ideals had real effects: Christianity ended the gladiatorial shows, softened slavery, "established charity on a large scale, and inaugurated hospitals"; "in a new form, it passed over into modern Liberalism, and remains the inspiration of much that is most hopeful in our sombre world." Equality came through the Orphic societies into Stoicism and Christianity (John Woolman's Journal); liberty, with its strange meanings (Roman senators' "liberty" to plunder provinces; Brutus lending at 60 per cent), entered politics as religious toleration, "a doctrine which came to be widely adopted in the seventeenth century through the inability of either Protestants or Catholics to exterminate the opposite party," brought to England by the Dutch King William "along with the Bank of England and the National Debt... all three were products of the commercial mentality." Locke is "the greatest of the theoretical advocates of liberty." Free press, free speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest followed; "their hold on men's minds was much more precarious than was at the time supposed" — "Stalin could neither understand nor respect the point of view which led Churchill to allow himself to be peaceably dispossessed as a result of a popular vote." Democracy is "a device for reconciling government with liberty": "all history shows that any set of men entrusted with power over another set will abuse their power if they can do so with impunity." Law and government are the last pair: "Government can easily exist without law, but law cannot exist without government — a fact which was forgotten by those who framed the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact"; "War has always been the chief promoter of governmental power"; personal liberty means due process plus "a sphere within which a man's actions are not to be subject to governmental control."

The missing step. "In international affairs we have not yet reached the first stage, although it is now evident that international government is at least as important to mankind as national government." "National governments were oppressive when they were new and are still oppressive in most countries, and yet hardly anybody would on this ground advocate anarchy within a nation." The historical trajectory: "the apes lost their tails," agriculture increased population, technique has brought a new crisis — "either man must again become a rare species as in the days of Homo Pekinensis, or we must learn to submit to an international government." "As in the course of the past 5,000 years men have climbed gradually from the despotism of the Pharaohs to the glories of the American Constitution, so perhaps in the next 5,000 they may climb from a bad international government to a good one." "All that is necessary to save mankind from disaster is the step from two independent States to one — not by war, which would bring disaster, but by agreement." Then the promise: poverty abolished with "no more than four or five hours a day of productive labour," disease reduced, "the kind of carefree adventurousness that characterizes the rich young Athenians of Plato's Dialogues." "It requires for its realization only one thing: that the men who hold power, and the populations that support them, should think it more important to keep themselves alive than to cause the death of their enemies." "There is grave reason for fear, but there is enough possibility of a good solution to make hope not irrational. And it is on this hope that we must act."

Key ideas

• "The main use to which, throughout the ages, men have put their technical skill has been to increase the total population" — whether happiness has increased is doubtful.
• The great prehistoric inventions — language, fire, domestication, agriculture, writing — set the course; agriculture at first demanded "the blood of infants," and it took thousands of years to learn that grain grows without it.
• Aristotle's "final" causes "always led to bad science"; Galileo's law of inertia unified the earth and heavens and founded "the purely materialistic physics" that still governs technique.
• "The soul, if it exists, plays no part in any discoverable causal law."
• Scientific progress without moral progress "may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about."
• The brotherhood of man — Stoic, Christian, Buddhist — actually diminished cruelty: gladiatorial shows, slavery, and hospitals are its monuments, and it "passed over into modern Liberalism."
• Liberty entered politics as religious toleration, "a product of the commercial mentality"; democracy is "a device for reconciling government with liberty."
• "In international affairs we have not yet reached the first stage": law cannot exist without government, and between nations there is none.
• "Either man must again become a rare species as in the days of Homo Pekinensis, or we must learn to submit to an international government" — by agreement, not war.

Key takeaway

The ideas that have helped mankind are the technical ones that gave command over nature and the moral ones that widened sympathy — and everything now hangs on the single further step of international government, taken by agreement.

Chapter 10 — Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind

Central question

Which beliefs have done the most damage, and what is the psychological machinery by which harmful ideas cloak cruel passions?

Main argument

Man as his own worst enemy. "The misfortunes of human beings may be divided into two classes: First, those inflicted by the non-human environment, and, second, those inflicted by other people." As knowledge grows, the second class grows: the present threat of famine "is not due to natural causes alone" but to six years of organized killing. "As this illustration shows, it is now man that is man's worst enemy."

Ideas as cloaks for passions. "The evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions." The Lisbon auto-da-fé: the crowd was furious when a heretic was granted the mercy of strangling before the flames — the spectacle was "one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward." Dr. Arnold, "the hero of Tom Brown's Schooldays," enjoyed flogging boys. "I cannot think of any instance of an erroneous medical treatment that was agreeable rather than disagreeable to the patient"; "The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses" — the rhyme "A dog, a wife, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be" is the emblem.

Religious beliefs and ascetic cruelty. Human sacrifice to improve crops, the Old Testament duty of extermination, the terrors of the afterlife — "they never reached their full development until the victory of Christianity." The ascetic saints, denying themselves "meat and wine and the society of women," still had the pleasures of the mind — and a high place among them was "the contemplation of the eternal tortures to which the pagans and heretics would hereafter be subjected" (Milton's Satan, Tertullian exulting). "When a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right to torture others, and inclines him to accept any system of dogma by which this right is fortified." The pattern survives in new dogmas: the Nazis' "guns rather than butter," the earnest Communists to whom "luxury is an evil, hard work the principal duty, and universal poverty the means to the millennium." "The combination of asceticism and cruelty has not disappeared with the softening of Christian dogma, but has taken on new forms hostile to Christianity."

Sin and vindictive punishment. The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment are "at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics." Russell does not believe the feeling of sin is innate, "though I believe it to be a product of very early infancy... if this feeling could be eradicated, the amount of cruelty in the world would be very greatly diminished." "Given that we are all sinners and that we all deserve punishment, there is evidently much to be said for a system that causes the punishment to fall upon others than ourselves" — Calvinists by "undeserved mercy" would go to heaven, and Communists are similar: "When we are born we do not choose whether we are to be born capitalists or proletarians, but if the latter we are among the elect." ("Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have borne fruit in his son's psychology.")

The cow parable and the witch. Self-importance makes men imagine their own fortunes are the purpose of others' actions. The cow by the railway, "if it were a metaphysician, would argue: 'Everything in my own desires and hopes and fears has reference to myself'... This noisy train, therefore, intends to do me either good or evil." A train that wished her neither well nor ill "would seem more cold and more abysmally horrifying than a train that wished her ill. Just this has happened with human beings." Hence demonology and witchcraft: "The witch is a person who injures her neighbours from sheer hatred, not from any hope of gain. The belief in witchcraft... afforded a most satisfying outlet for the delicious emotion of self-righteous cruelty" — with Biblical warrant ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"), and the Inquisition punished even disbelief in witchcraft. "Science, by giving some insight into natural causation, dissipated the belief in magic, but could not wholly dispel the fear and sense of insecurity that had given rise to it. In modern times, these same emotions find an outlet in fear of foreign nations."

Envy and economic nationalism. "One of the most powerful sources of false belief is envy" — neighbours' incomes, the jealousy of promoted colleagues, the rule of seniority. The parable of the monopolist butcher and baker: each ruined his competitors and then found there were no customers — "they had forgotten that while a man may be injured by his competitors he is benefited by his customers." "This is a fable... but substitute for a town the world, and for individuals nations, and you will have a perfect picture of the economic policy universally pursued in the present day": the Ruhr coal industry crippled after 1918, "the whole philosophy of economic nationalism... based upon the false belief that the economic interest of one nation is necessarily opposed to that of another." "This false belief, by producing international hatreds and rivalries, is a cause of war, and in this way tends to make itself true."

Pride in all its forms. Pride of nationality (when young, "one Englishman could defeat three Frenchmen"; the Bulgarians and Serbs absurd, the Great Powers' pride just as unjustifiable); pride of race (cultivated Chinese despised by "gross and ignorant white men"; the garage proprietor in America; the English in India; the Greeks despising barbarians; Jews and Gentiles each in turn); the belief in male superiority ("There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle" — pedigree bulls are judged by their female ancestors; anatomists' brain arguments until women got the vote; "Thomas Aquinas states parenthetically, as something entirely obvious, that men are more rational than women"), with its effects: marriage as "master and slave," dull respectable women, homosexuality among the most civilized men, domineering habits; pride of class (Soviet Russia's proletarian privileges; America's equality "only upwards, not downwards"; English snobbery now attached to education and manner of speech); and pride of creed (the elderly woman who supposed the Chinese, "being heathen, would of course have no virtues"; the Mormons; the Middle Ages' mutual conviction of wickedness). "All these are pleasant ways of feeling 'grand'... We are human beings, therefore human beings are the purpose of creation... Finally, and above all, we each have one merit which is entirely unique, we are Ourself." "If we could feel genuinely that we are the equals of our neighbours, neither their betters nor their inferiors, perhaps life would become less of a battle."

Divine missions. "One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected, is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will": the Israelites and the Promised Land ("Perhaps if these others had written long history books the matter might have looked a little different" — the Hittites did leave inscriptions), Rome's destiny, Islam's Paradise with houris, Cromwell ("I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken" — to the Scotch; "It is a pity that Cromwell never addressed the same remark to himself"), Andrew Jackson as the agent of Manifest Destiny, and "in our day, the sword of the Lord has been put into the hands of the Marxists": "Hegel thought that the Dialectic with fatalistic logic had given supremacy to Germany. 'No,' said Marx, 'not to Germany, but to the Proletariat.'" The Divine-mission argument "justifies a ruthless cruelty which would be condemned if our programme had a merely mundane origin" — "It is good to know that God is on our side, but a little confusing when you find the enemy equally convinced of the opposite" (the "Gott strafe England" verse).

The central moral. "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." "To know the truth is more difficult than most men suppose, and to act with ruthless determination in the belief that truth is the monopoly of their party is to invite disaster." "Long calculations that certain evil in the present is worth inflicting for the sake of some doubtful benefit in the future are always to be viewed with suspicion, for, as Shakespeare says: 'What's to come is still unsure.'" "In public, as in private life, the important thing is tolerance and kindliness, without the presumption of a superhuman ability to read the future." The title might even have been "Ideas have harmed mankind," for "the chance that any belief which a man may hold may be true is very slender": "Whatever you think is going to happen ten years hence, unless it is something like the sun rising to-morrow... you are almost sure to be wrong" — "I find this thought consoling."

Statesmanship and social science. Some prevision is necessary and possible: it is a fair prophecy that calling a man a knave and a fool will not make him love you; that cut-throat competition breeds no fellowship; that two armed states whose statesmen exchange insults will in time go to war; "It is safe to assume that a great modern war will not raise the level of prosperity even among the victors." What is difficult is detail: "Bismarck with extreme astuteness won three wars and unified Germany. The long-run result of his policy has been that Germany has suffered two colossal defeats." Social science already knows how to avoid slumps and knows "that only an international government can prevent war" — "there is, in fact, a great deal more social science than politicians are willing or able to apply." Democracy, too, can be fanatical and thus harmful: "A democrat need not believe that the majority will always decide wisely"; "In politics, as elsewhere, it does not do to deal in absolutes."

What the world needs. Organization — "political organization for the elimination of wars, economic organization to enable men to work productively... educational organization to generate a sane internationalism" — and moral qualities: "the qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms." "The two aims, the organizational and the ethical, are closely interwoven"; "we are all one family, and... the happiness of no one branch of this family can be built securely upon the ruin of another." "At the present time, moral defects stand in the way of clear thinking, and muddled thinking encourages moral defects." The last sentence: "Perhaps, though I scarcely dare to hope it, the hydrogen bomb will terrify mankind into sanity and tolerance. If this should happen we shall have reason to bless its inventors."

Key ideas

• "It is now man that is man's worst enemy": man-made misfortune now exceeds natural misfortune.
• Harmful ideas are "cloaks for evil passions": cruelty invents justifications (burning heretics, flogging boys, beating wives and walnut trees).
• Asceticism is psychologically linked to cruelty: "when a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right to torture others" — from Tertullian to the Nazis' "guns rather than butter."
• The sense of sin and vindictive punishment — sin as "a product of very early infancy" — is "at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics."
• Envy underlies economic nationalism: the monopolist fable shows competitors remembered and customers forgotten; nations repeat the error on a world scale.
• Pride of nation, race, sex, class, and creed are "pleasant ways of feeling 'grand'" kept alive by power; the belief in male superiority rests on "nothing... except his superior muscle."
• The belief in a Divine mission — from the Israelites to Manifest Destiny to the Marxist Dialectic — licenses "a ruthless cruelty which would be condemned if our programme had a merely mundane origin."
• "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false."
• "In public, as in private life, the important thing is tolerance and kindliness, without the presumption of a superhuman ability to read the future."
• The world needs organization and charity together: "moral defects stand in the way of clear thinking, and muddled thinking encourages moral defects."

Key takeaway

The beliefs that have harmed mankind are the ones that certify cruelty — doctrines of sin, divine mission, and national or racial superiority — and the cure is the humility of uncertainty: "think it possible that you may be mistaken."

Chapter 11 — Eminent Men I Have Known

Central question

What distinguishes the truly unforgettable among the eminent — and is personal impressiveness proportional to fame?

Main argument

Impressiveness and fame. "I have known in the course of my life many eminent men and women, from Victorian times to the present day. The quality of being unforgettable, or personally impressive, has not, in my experience, been greatest in those who have made the greatest mark in history, except in a few cases." His only encounter with Queen Victoria was at the age of two; Robert Browning, met at the same age, prompted the piercing remark "I wish that man would stop talking" — later "a pleasant, kindly old gentleman... without the divine fire that one expects of a poet." Tennyson "was always acting the poet" — stalking the countryside in a flowing Italian cloak, "very emphatically not seeing the people he happened to meet." Of the other poets: Ernst Toller, "chiefly through his capacity for intense impersonal suffering"; Rupert Brooke, "beautiful and vital, but the impression was marred by a touch of Byronic insincerity."

Philosophers and men of science. Among philosophers, the most personally impressive was William James — "in spite of a complete naturalness and absence of all apparent consciousness of being a great man... a natural aristocrat." A different quality, intellectual honesty, marked Henry Sidgwick, his teacher in ethics, who resigned his Cambridge fellowship over the Thirty-Nine Articles and "considered objections by pupils as courteously and carefully as if they had been made by colleagues." Men of science, at their best, combine "great intellect with childlike simplicity" — "the habit of thinking impersonally, without regard for the worldly advantage or disadvantage of an opinion or an action. Among the men of science I have known, Einstein is a supreme example of this quality."

Gladstone. Among politicians Russell knew seven Prime Ministers, "from my grandfather (who was Prime Minister in 1846) to Mr. Attlee. Far the most unforgettable of those was Gladstone." The only other man in public life his equal in impressiveness was Lenin: "Mr. Gladstone was embodied Victorianism; Lenin was embodied Marxian formulas — neither quite human, but each with the power of a natural force." Gladstone dominated "by the power of his eye... calculated to inspire terror"; his grandmother, the most formidable woman Russell ever knew, failed utterly to set him right on Irish policy. Russell's most terrifying experience: aged seventeen, left tête-à-tête with "the ogre" — who at last said, in his booming bass: "This is very good port they've given me, but why have they given it me in a claret-glass?" Labouchere's summing-up: "Like every politician, he always has a card up his sleeve; but unlike the others, he thinks the Lord put it there." "Invariably he earnestly consulted his conscience, and invariably his conscience earnestly gave him the convenient answer." Yet "to half the nation he was almost a god" — and the other half, including "a great majority of the well-to-do," regarded him as "either mad or wicked or both" (the story of the twenty top-hats ordered every morning).

Lenin. Russell had "a long conversation" with Lenin in Moscow in 1920. The differences from Gladstone: "Lenin was cruel, which Gladstone was not"; no respect for tradition; all means legitimate — "all these differences, to my mind, are to the advantage of Gladstone." The resemblances ran deeper: "Lenin supposed himself to be an atheist, but in this he was mistaken. He thought that the world was governed by the dialectic, whose instrument he was; just as much as Gladstone, he conceived of himself as the human agent of a superhuman Power." Both men "derived their personal force from this unshakable conviction of their own rectitude." But face to face, "I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty" — Russell's question about socialism in agriculture drew the gleeful explanation of how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, "and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree — ha! ha! ha!... His gulfaw at the thought of those massacred men made my blood run cold." Lenin's power depended on the fact that "in a bewildered and defeated nation, he, almost alone, had no doubt, and held out hopes of a new sort of victory in spite of military disaster"; his followers' passion "came to appear... to have the sanction of science. Robespierre must have had something of the same quality."

The pure of heart. Russell closes with those of no eminence: "What I have found most unforgettable is a certain kind of moral quality, a quality of self-forgetfulness" — the illiterate gardener, "a perfect type of simple goodness, such as Tolstoy loved to depict among peasants," and E. D. Morel, the shipping clerk who sacrificed his livelihood to expose King Leopold's Congo horrors, was sent to prison as a pacifist in the war, and was excluded from the first Labour Government by Ramsay MacDonald. "Worldly success seldom comes to such men, but they inspire love and admiration, in those who know them, surpassing what is given to those who are less pure of heart."

Key ideas

• "The quality of being unforgettable, or personally impressive, has not, in my experience, been greatest in those who have made the greatest mark in history."
• Browning was "without the divine fire that one expects of a poet"; Tennyson was "always acting the poet."
• William James was "a natural aristocrat" in spite of himself; Sidgwick's intellectual honesty (resigning over the Thirty-Nine Articles) made his teaching "more fruitful than that of many abler men."
• Scientists at their best combine "great intellect with childlike simplicity" — Einstein is "a supreme example."
• Gladstone and Lenin were the two most impressive public men Russell knew: "embodied Victorianism" and "embodied Marxian formulas — neither quite human, but each with the power of a natural force."
• Gladstone's force rested on profound moral conviction that was also self-deception: "he always has a card up his sleeve; but... he thinks the Lord put it there."
• Lenin, who supposed himself an atheist, "conceived of himself as the human agent of a superhuman Power"; his gleeful laugh over the hanged peasants "made my blood run cold."
• Lenin's power: "in a bewildered and defeated nation, he, almost alone, had no doubt."
• What is most unforgettable is "a quality of self-forgetfulness" — the illiterate gardener and E. D. Morel outweigh the famous.

Key takeaway

What is unforgettable in eminent men is not their eminence but the force of conviction — or of self-forgetful goodness — behind it: Gladstone and Lenin are paired by their certainty, while Russell values most the pure of heart.

Chapter 12 — Obituary

Central question

What would an establishment obituary of Bertrand Russell look like — and what does writing it himself reveal about him and his critics?

Main argument

The subject. "By the death of the Third Earl Russell (or Bertrand Russell, as he preferred to call himself) at the age of ninety, a link with a very distant past is severed." His grandfather, Lord John Russell the Victorian Prime Minister, visited Napoleon in Elba; his maternal grandmother was a friend of the Young Pretender's widow. The obituary, in the dignified manner of The Times, rehearses the career — and the charges.

The charges. "In his youth he did work of importance in mathematical logic, but his eccentric attitude during the first World War revealed a lack of balanced judgment which increasingly infected his later writings." He was educated at home by tutors (no public school), became Seventh Wrangler in 1893 and a Fellow in 1895; in the fifteen years that followed he produced The Foundations of Geometry, The Philosophy of Leibniz, The Principles of Mathematics, and, with Dr. A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica — "This last work, which was of great importance in its day, doubtless owed much of its superiority to... Whitehead... possessed of that insight and spiritual depth so notably absent in Russell; for Russell's argumentation, ingenious and clever as it is, ignores those higher considerations that transcend mere logic." During the first World War he "perversely maintained that, war being an evil, the aim of statesmanship should have been to bring the war to an end as soon as possible, which would have been achieved by British neutrality and a German victory... It must be supposed that mathematical studies had caused him to take a wrongly quantitative view which ignored the question of principle involved." Trinity College "very properly" deprived him of his lectureship, and in 1918 he went to prison.

The later life. In 1920 a brief visit to Russia, "whose government did not impress him favourably," and a longer visit to China, "where he enjoyed the rationalism of the traditional civilization, with its still surviving flavour of the eighteenth century." "In subsequent years his energies were dissipated in writings advocating socialism, educational reform, and a less rigid code of morals as regards marriage." "His historical writings, by their style and their wit, conceal from careless readers the superficiality of the antiquated rationalism which he professed to the end." In the second World War "he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak"; in private conversation he would say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, "but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it" — "Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility."

The summing-up. "His life, for all its waywardness, had a certain anachronistic consistency, reminiscent of that of the aristocratic rebels of the early nineteenth century. His principles were curious, but, such as they were, they governed his actions. In private life he showed none of the acerbity which marred his writings, but was a genial conversationalist and not devoid of human sympathy. He had many friends, but had survived almost all of them... in extreme old age, full of enjoyment... politically, during his last years, he was as isolated as Milton after the Restoration. He was the last survivor of a dead epoch."

The twist. The obituary is written by Russell himself, in the voice of the enemy. Every standard charge against the rationalist — lack of "spiritual depth," "superficiality of the antiquated rationalism," the "wrongly quantitative" view of war, dissipation into reform, the unheroic 1939 — is allowed to speak in its own pompous voice; and the essay answers them exactly as the rest of the book does, by letting the conventional certainties ("no right-thinking person can admit that those who died for the right in the great struggle have died in vain") condemn themselves. The only facts the hostile narrator concedes — "His principles were curious, but, such as they were, they governed his actions" — are, in Russell's own scheme, the whole defence.

Key ideas

• The obituary is a self-written satire in the style of The Times, letting an establishment voice rehearse the standard charges against Russell's rationalism.
• The charges: "lack of balanced judgment," "spiritual depth so notably absent in Russell," "superficiality of the antiquated rationalism," a "wrongly quantitative" view of war, energies "dissipated" in reform, and an unheroic exit in 1939.
• Principia Mathematica "doubtless owed much of its superiority" to Whitehead — the familiar sneer that logic lacks depth.
• The war-time creed the essay mocks: "heroism has a value independent of its utility" — "no right-thinking person can admit that those who died for the right... have died in vain."
• The one concession is the whole defence: "His principles were curious, but, such as they were, they governed his actions."
• Even the hostile narrator admits the private man was genial, affectionate, and "full of enjoyment" in extreme old age.
• "He was the last survivor of a dead epoch" — the aristocratic rebel as anachronism.

Key takeaway

Russell's self-obituary lets the critics' charges — superficial rationalism, cold logic, unheroic ethics — speak in their own voice, and answers them with the one fact that matters to him: the life was governed by its principles.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (Philosophy and Politics) — establishes that bad, dogmatic philosophy is politically dangerous, and that empiricism — which holds beliefs tentatively — is the intellectual counterpart and only justification of liberal democracy.
2. Chapter 2 (Philosophy for Laymen) — establishes that philosophy as "love of wisdom" teaches suspended judgment, the one discipline that protects ordinary citizens from the cocksure prophets of the age.
3. Chapter 3 (The Future of Mankind) — establishes that the sovereign-state system cannot survive the atomic age and that only a world government with a monopoly of armed force can save mankind.
4. Chapter 4 (Philosophy's Ulterior Motives) — establishes that the great metaphysical systems are driven by hidden desires — certainty, comfort, self-importance — and are therefore "ingenious attempts to think fallaciously."
5. Chapter 5 (The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed) — establishes that attributing special virtue to the oppressed is a flattering myth of the powerful, which dissolves once equality is achieved.
6. Chapter 6 (On Being Modern-minded) — establishes that the worship of novelty is a new form of servitude: the modern-minded man suppresses his individuality for the admiration of the herd.
7. Chapter 7 (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish) — establishes the catalogue of human error — self-esteem, fear, love of the marvellous, government propaganda — and the simple rules that guard against silly error.
8. Chapter 8 (The Functions of a Teacher) — establishes that teachers, as the guardians of civilization, must be free to teach impartial inquiry, and that their independence is the safeguard against totalitarianism.
9. Chapter 9 (Ideas That Have Helped Mankind) — establishes that technical ideas and the widening of sympathy (brotherhood, liberty, law) have helped mankind, and that one further step — international government by agreement — is still required.
10. Chapter 10 (Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind) — establishes that the harmful ideas are the cloaks for cruel passions — sin, divine mission, national and racial pride — and that certainty is the root of the greatest evils.
11. Chapter 11 (Eminent Men I Have Known) — establishes, through the paired portraits of Gladstone and Lenin, that the force of conviction — or of self-forgetful goodness — is what makes men unforgettable.
12. Chapter 12 (Obituary) — closes by letting an imaginary establishment obituary rehearse the standard charges against Russell's rationalism, and answering them with the consistency of a principled life.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The title means the essays were unpopular with readers. The title is a joke explained in the Preface. After reviewers complained that his earlier Human Knowledge was difficult despite its preface promising readability, Russell "confesses" that some sentences in this volume "some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling," and on that ground disclaims that the essays are "popular" — "and if not popular, then 'unpopular.'" The book was in fact a critical and commercial success.

Misunderstanding: The book is an attack on philosophy. It attacks bad philosophy — dogmatic metaphysics, "an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously" — and defends philosophy as "love of wisdom," the discipline of suspended judgment. Russell's complaint is that philosophers abandoned their own method, not that philosophy is worthless.

Misunderstanding: "Philosophy's Ulterior Motives" accuses philosophers of deliberate dishonesty. The charge is unconscious bias, not fraud: the philosopher's desire to believe "a momentary lack of vigilance allows a fallacy to pass undetected." Leibniz's unpublished good philosophy shows the pressures are partly social, but the diagnosis is psychological, not moralistic.

Misunderstanding: "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed" sneers at the oppressed. It attacks the sentimental myth — held by oppressors — that victimhood confers moral excellence, and shows the myth dissolves once equality arrives. The essay's target is the flattery of the powerful, not the worth of the powerless; Russell was a lifelong campaigner for women's suffrage and social equality.

Misunderstanding: "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" is a purely anti-religious polemic. Religion is only the first of many fields surveyed: race, nationality, economics, psychology, punishment, medicine, and political propaganda all supply "rubbish." The essay ends with positive rules for avoiding silly error, not with a sneer.

Misunderstanding: In "The Future of Mankind" Russell abandoned pacifism to advocate aggressive war. Russell argued that world government "will have to be imposed by force," hoped "the threat of force may suffice," and preferred an American-led alliance over Soviet victory or international anarchy — a hard-headed survival argument, not a celebration of war. He calls a Russian victory "an appalling disaster" and a world empire "preferable to the results of a continuation of the present international anarchy."

Misunderstanding: The two "Ideas" essays are a defence of science over morality. They argue the opposite of the slogan: "scientific progress without a corresponding, moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about." Both essays are equally concerned with moral ideas — the brotherhood of man, liberty, law — and with their insufficiency.

Misunderstanding: "Obituary" is a genuine obituary of Russell. It is a satirical self-obituary in the manner of The Times, in which Russell writes the hostile account an establishment critic would give — "spiritual depth so notably absent in Russell" — and lets the charges condemn themselves. (Its claim that he "escaped to a neutral country" in 1939 is one of the mock accusations.)

Misunderstanding: Russell denies that man is rational, so the book despairs of reason. The denial is the premise of the argument, not its conclusion: man is not rational by nature, but can become more so by discipline — observation, impartiality, the conquest of fear. The book is itself an exercise in that discipline.

Misunderstanding: A book so witty cannot be serious. The Preface anticipates this: "This serious purpose inspires them even if, at times, they seem flippant, for those who are solemn and pontifical are not to be successfully fought by being even more solemn and even more pontifical."

Central paradox / key insight

The collection's most counterintuitive theme is that the great danger to mankind is not doubt but certainty. The essays argue, again and again, that the gravest evils — persecution, war, the concentration camps — were committed by people "feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false," while the much-maligned attitudes of tentativeness and doubt are the foundations of both knowledge and kindness. Relatedly, the book defends reason on the admission that man is not a rational animal, and defends philosophy against the philosophers: the discipline of suspended judgment is the cure for the dogmatic metaphysics that philosophy itself produced.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance.

Important concepts

Dogmatism — belief held on authority and without evidence, "whether of the Right or of the Left"; the book's central enemy, "an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy."

Empiricism / empiricist liberalism — the theory that all knowledge is in some degree doubtful and corrigible; "the only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy."

The demand for certainty — "one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice."

Suspended judgment — the habit of withholding belief in the absence of evidence while acting on the best hypothesis; "for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy."

Scepticism — absolute doubt; "the sceptic is useless," as distinct from the tentative empiricist temper, which is neither dogmatic nor sceptical.

Intellectual virtues — truthfulness ("love to know, and hate to be in error"), impartiality, and generality; philosophy's contribution to the "best way of life."

The dialectic — Hegel's and Marx's logical development by thesis, antithesis, synthesis; in Marx's hands a guarantee of victory giving "a hold on the head as well as the heart."

The Absolute Idea — Hegel's "pure thought thinking about pure thought," the terminus of his dialectic, which Russell treats as the apotheosis of the Prussian State.

The superior virtue of the oppressed — the flattering myth, held by those in power, that victimhood confers moral excellence; it begins when oppressors' power wavers and collapses when equality arrives.

Modern-mindedness — the worship of the latest fashion in opinion; "our age is the most parochial since Homer."

Intellectual rubbish — false belief generated by self-esteem, fear, love of the marvellous, and government propaganda; the subject of the book's longest essay and its practical rules.

Propaganda vs. education — instilling beliefs "thought useful by employers" versus forming independent judgment; the propagandist is "a topiary artist" shaping pupils to the gardener's purpose.

Civilization — "a thing of the mind," consisting in enlarged knowledge and enlarged emotions; its guardians are teachers.

Efficient vs. final cause — Aristotle's distinction between cause and purpose; science deals only with efficient causes, and "the attempt to explain phenomena by 'final' causes has always led to bad science."

World government — the single authority with "a monopoly of all the major weapons of war"; the only system that can end war, to be established by force or the threat of force.

Brotherhood of man — the Stoic, Buddhist, and Christian doctrine that widened human sympathy and passes into "modern Liberalism."

Sin — the guilt feeling, "a product of very early infancy," that stands "at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics," and licenses vindictive punishment.

Divine mission / Manifest Destiny — the belief that one's nation or class is the special instrument of destiny; it justifies "a ruthless cruelty which would be condemned if our programme had a merely mundane origin."

Practical optimism — the scientific alternative to metaphysical optimism: "we, by our intelligence, can make the world such as to satisfy a large proportion of our desires."

References and Web Links

Full text (first edition, verified)

• Internet Archive: Unpopular Essays (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1950 — the DLI scan whose contents page, Preface, Acknowledgment, and full text of all twelve essays were read for this outline): https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628
• Full OCR text file of the same scan: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628/2015.462628.Unpopular-Essays_djvu.txt
• Internet Archive item record for the Simon & Schuster (New York, 1950) edition: https://archive.org/details/unpopularessays027477mbp

Edition records and tables of contents (verified)

• Google Books "About" page for the Simon & Schuster 1950 contents (reproduced in the 2008 Read Books reprint; shows the complete twelve-essay table of contents, the Preface, and the opening of "Philosophy and Politics"): https://books.google.com/books/about/Unpopular_Essays.html?id=FhVkvujdvWIC
• Open Library work page for Unpopular Essays (edition list; the Routledge 2009 record carries the same twelve-essay contents): https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1088334W — and the machine-readable edition list used to check the Routledge contents: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1088334W/editions.json
• Routledge Classics edition (2009, ISBN 978-0-415-47370-5, 184 pp.), publisher blurb confirming the standard twelve-essay collection: https://unabridgedbookstore.com/book/9780415473705

Context (supplement, not a substitute for the text)

• Bertrand Russell (Wikipedia) — bibliography entry: "1950. Unpopular Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin," with the Internet Archive link to the Simon and Schuster edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell