he is a friend or an enemy and, if the latter, we think we are justi?ed in
compelling the law to punish him.
In addition to those who consider all war wrong, there are those who
object to the particular war that they are asked to ?ght. This happened with
many people at the time of the Korean War and later in regard to the Vietnam
War. Such people are punished if they refuse to ?ght. The law not only
punishes those who condemn all war, but also those who condemn any
particular war although it must be obvious that in any war one side, at least, is
encouraging evil. Those who take this position of objecting to a certain war
or a certain law or to certain actions of governments may be held justi?ed
because it is so doubtful that they are not justi?ed. Such considerations, it will
be said, since they condemn the punishment of supposed malefactors, throw
the autobiography of bertrand russell 496doubt upon the whole criminal law. I believe this is true and I hold that every
condemned criminal incurs a certain measure of doubt, sometimes great and
sometimes small. This is admitted when it is an enemy who is tried, as in the
Nuremberg Trials. It was widely admitted that the Nuremberg prisoners
would not have been condemned if they had been tried by Germans. The
enemies of the German Government would have punished with death any
soldier among themselves who had practised the sort of civil disobedience
the lack of which among Germans they pleaded as an excuse for condemning
Germans. They refused to accept the plea made by many of those whom they
condemned that they had committed criminal acts only under command of
those in superior authority. The judges of Nuremberg believed that the
Germans should have committed civil disobedience in the name of decency
and humanity. This is little likely to have been their view if they had been
judging their own countrymen and not their enemies. But I believe it is true
of friend as well as foe. The line between proper acceptable civil disobedience
and inacceptable civil disobedience comes, I believe, with the reason for it
being committed – the seriousness of the object for which it is committed
and the profundity of the belief in its necessity.
Some years before I gave the Reith Lectures, my old professor and friend
and collaborator in Principia Mathematica, A. N. Whitehead, had been given the
??. Now, by the early part of 1949, I had become so respectable in the eyes
of the Establishment that it was felt that I, too, should be given the ??. This
made me very happy for, though I dare say it would surprise many English-
men and most of the English Establishment to hear it, I am passionately
English, and I treasure an honour bestowed on me by the Head of my coun-
try. I had to go to Buckingham Palace for the o?cial bestowal of it. The King
was a?able, but somewhat embarrassed at having to behave graciously to so
queer a fellow, a convict to boot. He remarked, ‘You have sometimes behaved
in a way which would not do if generally adopted’. I have been glad ever
since that I did not make the reply that sprang to my mind: ‘Like your
brother.’ But he was thinking of things like my having been a conscientious
objector, and I did not feel that I could let this remark pass in silence, so I said:
‘How a man should behave depends upon his profession. A postman, for
instance, should knock at all the doors in a street at which he has letters to
deliver, but if anybody else knocked on all the doors, he would be considered
a public nuisance.’ The King, to avoid answering, abruptly changed the sub-
ject by asking me whether I knew who was the only man who had both the
?? and the ??. I did not know, and he graciously informed me that it was
Lord Portal. I did not mention that he was my cousin.
In the February of that year I had been asked to give an address, which I
called ‘L’Individu et l’Etat Moderne’, at the Sorbonne. In the course of it
I spoke warmly and in most laudatory terms of Jean Nicod, the brilliant and
return to england 497delightful young mathematician who died in 1924.
2
I was very glad after the
lecture that I had done so, for I learnt that, unknown to me, his widow had
been in the audience.
At the end of June, 1950, I went to Australia in response to an invitation by
the Australian Institute of International A?airs to give lectures at various
universities on subjects connected with the Cold War. I interpreted this
subject liberally and my lectures dealt with speculation about the future of
industrialism. There was a Labour Government there and, in spite of the fact
that the hatred and fear of China and, especially, Japan, was understandably
?erce, things seemed better and more hopeful than they appeared to become
in the following sixteen years. I liked the people and I was greatly impressed
by the size of the country and the fact that ordinary private conversations,
gossips, were conducted by radio. Because of the size, too, and people’s
relative isolation, the libraries and bookshops were impressively numerous
and good, and people read more than elsewhere. I was taken to the capitals,
and to Alice Springs which I wanted to see because it was so isolated. It was
a centre for agriculture and inhabited chie?y by sheep owners. I was shown
a ?ne gaol where I was assured that the cells were comfortable. In reply to my
query as to why, I was told: ‘Oh, because all the leading citizens at one time
or another are in gaol.’ I was told that, expectedly and regularly, whenever
possible, they stole each other’s sheep.
I visited all parts of Australia except Tasmania. The Korean War was in full
swing, and I learnt to my surprise that the northern parts of Queensland had,
when war broke out, been evacuated, but were again inhabited when I was
there.
The Government, I found, treated the Aborigines fairly well, but the police
and the public treated them abominably. I was taken by a public o?cial
whose duty it was to look after Aborigines to see a village in which all the
inhabitants were native Australians. One complained to us that he had had a
bicycle which had been stolen, and he displayed marked unwillingness to
complain to the police about it. I asked my conductor why, and he explained
that any native who appealed to the police would be grossly ill-treated by
them. I observed, myself, that white men generally spoke abusively to the
Aborigines.
My other contact with the Government concerned irrigation. There is a
chain of hills called ‘Snowy Mountains’ and there was a Federal scheme to
utilise these mountains for purposes of irrigation. When I was there the
scheme was bogged down by the operation of States which would not bene-
?t by it. A scheme was being pushed to advocate the proposed irrigation on
the grounds of defence rather than of irrigation, thus avoiding con?icts of
States which are a standard problem in Australian politics. I spoke in favour of
this scheme.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 498I was kept very busy making speeches and being interviewed by journalists
and, at the end of my stay, I was presented with a beautifully bound book of
press cuttings which I cherish, though I do not like much of what the
journalists report me as saying of myself. I had advocated birth control on
some occasion and naturally the Roman Catholics did not approve of me, and
the Archbishop of Melbourne said publicly that I had been at one time
excluded from the United States by the United States Government. This was
not true; and I spoke of suing him, but a group of journalists questioned him
on the point and he admitted his error publicly, which was a disappointment,
since it meant that I had to relinquish the hope of receiving damages from an
Archbishop.
On my way home to England my plane stopped at Singapore and Karachi
and Bombay and other places. Though I was not permitted to visit any of
these places, beyond their airports, as the plane did not stop long enough,
I was called upon to make radio speeches. Later, I saw from a cutting from The
Sydney Morning Herald for August 26th, an account of my speech at Singapore. It
reported my saying: ‘I think that Britain should withdraw gracefully from
Asia, as she did in India, and not wait to be driven out in the event of a
war . . . In this way good-will will be won and a neutral Asian bloc could be
formed under the leadership of Pandit Nehru. This is the best thing that can
happen now, and the strongest argument in its favour is that it would be a
strategic move.’ This, though unheeded, seems to me to have been good
advice.
Soon after my return from Australia, I went again to the United States. I had
been asked to ‘give a short course’ in philosophy for a month at Mt Holyoak
College, a well-known college for women in New England. From there I went
to Princeton where I, as usual, delivered a lecture and again met various old
friends, among them Einstein. There I received the news that I was to be
given a Nobel Prize. But the chief memory of this visit to America is of the
series of three lectures that I gave on the Matchette Foundation at Columbia
University. I was put up in luxury at the Plaza Hotel and shepherded about by
Miss Julie Medlock, who had been appointed by Columbia to bear-lead me.
Her views on international a?airs were liberal and sympathetic and we have
continued to discuss them, both by letter and when she visits us as she
sometimes does.
My lectures, a few months later, appeared with other lectures that I had
given originally at Ruskin College, Oxford, and the Lloyd Roberts Lecture that
I had given in 1949 at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, as the basis of
my book called The Impact of Science on Society. The title is the same as that of the
three lectures that Columbia University published separately, which is
unfortunate as it causes bewilderment for bibliographers and is sometimes a
disappointment to those who come upon only the Columbia publication.
return to england 499I was astonished that, in New York, where I had been, so short a time
before, spoken of with vicious obloquy, my lectures seemed to be popular
and to draw crowds. This was not surprising, perhaps, at the ?rst lecture,
where the audience might have gathered to have a glimpse of so horrid a
character, hoping for shocks and scandal and general rebelliousness. But what
amazed me was that the hall should have been packed with enthusiastic
students in increasing numbers as the lectures proceeded. There were so
many that crowds of those who came had to be turned away for lack of even
standing room. I think it also surprised my hosts.
The chief matter with which I was concerned was the increase of human
power owing to scienti?c knowledge. The gist of my ?rst lecture was con-
tained in the following sentence: ‘It is not by prayer and humility that you
cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural
laws.’ I pointed out that the power to be acquired in this way is very much
greater than the power that men formerly sought to achieve by theological
means. The second lecture was concerned with the increase of power men
achieve by the application of scienti?c technique. It begins with gunpowder
and the mariners’ compass. Gunpowder destroyed the power of castles and
the mariners’ compass created the power of Europe over other parts of the
world. These increases of governmental power were important, but the new
power brought by the Industrial Revolution was more so. I was largely con-
cerned in this lecture with the bad e?ect of early industrial power and with
the dangers that will result if any powerful State adopts scienti?c breeding.
From this I went on to the increase of the harmfulness of war when scienti?c
methods are employed. This is, at present, the most important form of the
application of science in our day. It threatens the destruction of the human
race and, indeed, of all living beings of larger than microscopic size. If
mankind is to survive, the power of making scienti?c war will have to be
concentrated in a supreme State. But this is so contrary to men’s mental habits
that, as yet, the great majority would prefer to run the risk of extermination.
This is the supreme danger of our age. Whether a World Government will be
established in time or not is the supreme question. In my third lecture I am
concerned chie?y with certain views as to good and evil from which I dissent
although many men consider that they alone are scienti?c. The views in
question are that the good is identical with the useful. I ended these lectures
with an investigation of the kind of temperament which must be dominant if
a happy world is to be possible. The ?rst requisite, I should say, is absence of
dogmatism, since dogmatism almost inevitably leads to war. I will quote the
paragraph summing up what I thought necessary if the world is to be saved:
‘There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should
avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it
needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant
the autobiography of bertrand russell 500myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
The things that it must avoid and that have brought it to the brink of
catastrophe are cruelty, envy, greed, competitiveness, search for irrational
subjective certainty, and what Freudians call the death wish.’
I think I was mistaken in being surprised that my lectures were liked by
the audience. Almost any young academic audience is liberal and likes to hear
liberal and even quasi-revolutionary opinions expressed by someone in
authority. They like, also any jibe at any received opinion, whether orthodox
or not: for instance, I spent some time making fun of Aristotle for saying that
the bite of the shrewmouse is dangerous to a horse, especially if the shrew-
mouse is pregnant. My audience was irreverent and so was I. I think this
was the main basis of their liking of my lectures. My unorthodoxy was
not con?ned to politics. My trouble in New York in 1940 on sexual
morals had blown over but had left in any audience of mine an expectation
that they would hear something that the old and orthodox would consider
shocking. There were plenty of such items in my discussion of scienti?c
breeding. Generally, I had the pleasant experience of being applauded on the
very same remarks which had caused me to be ostracised on the earlier
occasion.
I got into trouble with a passage at the tail end of my last Columbia lecture.
In this passage, I said that what the world needs is ‘love, Christian love, or
compassion’. The result of my use of the word ‘Christian’ was a deluge of
letters from Free-thinkers deploring my adoption of orthodoxy, and from
Christians welcoming me to the fold. When, ten years later, I was welcomed
by the Chaplain to Brixton Prison with the words, ‘I am glad that you have
seen the light’, I had to explain to him that this was an entire misconception,
that my views were completely unchanged and that what he called seeing the
light I should call groping in darkness. I had thought it obvious that, when
I spoke of Christian love, I put in the adjective ‘Christian’ to distinguish it from
sexual love, and I should certainly have supposed that the context made this
completely clear. I go on to say that, ‘If you feel this you have a motive for
existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, and an imperative necessity
for intellectual honesty. If you feel this, you have all that anybody should
need in the way of religion.’ It seems to me totally inexplicable that anybody
should think the above words a description of Christianity, especially in view,
as some Christians will remember, of how very rarely Christians have shown
Christian love. I have done my best to console those who are not Christians
for the pain that I unwittingly caused them by a lax use of the suspect
adjective. My essays and lectures on the subject have been edited and pub-
lished in 1957 by Professor Paul Edwards along with an essay by him on my
New York di?culties of 1940, under the title Why I am not a Christian.
When I was called to Stockholm, at the end of 1950, to receive the Nobel
return to england 501Prize – somewhat to my surprise, for literature, for my book Marriage and
Morals – I was apprehensive, since I remembered that, exactly three hundred
years earlier, Descartes had been called to Scandinavia by Queen Christina in
the winter time and had died of the cold. However, we were kept warm and
comfortable, and instead of snow, we had rain, which was a slight disap-
pointment. The occasion, though very grand, was pleasant and I enjoyed it.
I was sorry for another prize winner who looked utterly miserable and was so
shy that he refused to speak to anyone and could not make himself heard
when he had to make his formal speech as we all had to do. My dinner
companion was Madame Joliot-Curie and I found her talk interesting. At the
evening party given by the King, an Aide-de-Camp came to say that the
King wished to talk with me. He wanted Sweden to join with Norway and
Denmark against the Russians. I said that it was obvious, if there were a war
between the West and the Russians, the Russians could only get to Norwegian
ports through and over Swedish territory. The King approved of this observa-
tion. I was rather pleased, too, by my speech, especially by the mechanical
sharks, concerning whom I said: ‘I think every big town should contain
arti?cial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they
should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found
advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with
these ingenious monsters.’ I found that two or three fellow Nobel prize-
winners listened to what I had to say and considered it not without impor-
tance. Since then I have published it in Part II of my book Human Society in Ethics
and Politics and a gramophone record has been made of it in America. I have
heard that it has a?ected many people more than I had thought which is
gratifying.
1950, beginning with the ?? and ending with the Nobel Prize, seems to
have marked the apogee of my respectability. It is true that I began to feel
slightly uneasy, fearing that this might mean the onset of blind orthodoxy.
I have always held that no one can be respectable without being wicked, but
so blunted was my moral sense that I could not see in what way I had sinned.
Honours and increased income which began with the sales of my History of
Western Philosophy gave me a feeling of freedom and assurance that let me
expend all my energies upon what I wanted to do. I got through an immense
amount of work and felt, in consequence, optimistic and full of zest. I sus-
pected that I had too much emphasised, hitherto, the darker possibilities
threatening mankind and that it was time to write a book in which the
happier issues of current disputes were brought into relief. I called this
book New Hopes for a Changing World and deliberately, wherever there were two
possibilities, I emphasised that it might be the happier one which would be
realised. I did not suggest that either the cheerful or the painful alternative
was the more probable, but merely that it is impossible to know which would
the autobiography of bertrand russell 502be victorious. The book ends with a picture of what the world may become if
we so choose. I say: ‘Man, in the long ages since he descended from the trees,
has passed arduously and perilously through a vast dusty desert, surrounded
by the whitening bones of those who have perished by the way, maddened
by hunger and thirst, by fear of wild beasts, by dread of enemies, not only
living enemies, but spectres of dead rivals projected on to the dangerous
world by the intensity of his own fears. At last he has emerged from the
desert into a smiling land, but in the long night he has forgotten how to
smile. We cannot believe in the brightness of the morning. We think it
trivial and deceptive; we cling to old myths that allow us to go on living
with fear and hate – above all, hate of ourselves, miserable sinners. This is
folly. Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to
joy, and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten
past. He must lift up his eyes and say: “No, I am not a miserable sinner; I am
a being who, by a long and arduous road, has discovered how to make
intelligence master natural obstacles, how to live in freedom and joy, at
peace with myself and therefore with all mankind.” This will happen if
men choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury man in
deserved oblivion.’
But my disquietude grew. My inability to make my fellow men see the
dangers ahead for them and all mankind weighed upon me. Perhaps it
heightened my pleasures as pain sometimes does, but pain was there and
increased with my increasing awareness of failure to make others share a
recognition of its cause. I began to feel that New Hopes for a Changing World
needed fresh and deeper examination and I attempted to make this in my
book Human Society in Ethics and Politics, the end of which, for a time, satis?ed my
craving to express my fears in an e?ective form.
What led me to write about ethics was the accusation frequently brought
against me that, while I had made a more or less sceptical inquiry into other
branches of knowledge, I had avoided the subject of ethics except in an early
essay expounding Moore’s Principia Ethica. My reply is that ethics is not a
branch of knowledge. I now, therefore, set about the task in a di?erent way. In
the ?rst half of the book, I dealt with the fundamental concepts of ethics; in
the second part, I dealt with the application of these concepts in practical
politics. The ?rst part analyses such concepts as moral codes; good and bad,
sin, superstitious ethics, and ethical sanctions. In all these I seek for an ethical
element in subjects which are traditionally labelled ethical. The conclusion
that I reach is that ethics is never an independent constituent, but is reducible
to politics in the last analysis. What are we to say, for example, about a war
in which the parties are evenly matched? In such a context each side
may claim that it is obviously in the right and that its defeat would be a
disaster to mankind. There would be no way of proving this assertion except
return to england 503by appealing to other ethical concepts such as hatred of cruelty or love of
knowledge or art. You may admire the Renaissance because they built
St Peter’s, but somebody may perplex you by saying that he prefers St Paul’s.
Or, again, the war may have sprung from lies told by one party which may
seem an admirable foundation to the contest until it appears that there was
equal mendacity on the other side. To arguments of this sort there is no
purely rational conclusion. If one man believes that the earth is round and
another believes that it is ?at, they can set o? on a joint voyage and decide the
matter reasonably. But if one believes in Protestantism and the other in
Catholicism, there is no known method of reaching a rational conclusion. For
such reasons, I had come to agree with Santayana that there is no such thing
as ethical knowledge. Nevertheless, ethical concepts have been of enormous
importance in history, and I could not but feel that a survey of human a?airs
which omits ethics is inadequate and partial.
I adopted as my guiding thought the principle that ethics is derived from
passions and that there is no valid method of travelling from passion to what
ought to be done. I adopted David Hume’s maxim that ‘Reason is, and ought
only to be, the slave of the passions’. I am not satis?ed with this, but it is the
best that I can do. Critics are fond of charging me with being wholly rational
and this, at least, proves that I am not entirely so. The practical distinction
among passions comes as regards their success: some passions lead to success
in what is desired; others, to failure. If you pursue the former, you will be
happy; if the latter, unhappy. Such, at least, will be the broad general rule.
This may seem a poor and tawdry result of researches into such sublime
concepts as ‘duty’, ‘self-denial’, ‘ought’, and so forth, but I am persuaded that
it is the total of the valid outcome, except in one particular: we feel that the
man who brings widespread happiness at the expense of misery to himself is
a better man than the man who brings unhappiness to others and happiness
to himself. I do not know any rational ground for this view, or perhaps, for
the somewhat more rational view that whatever the majority desires is pref-
erable to what the minority desires. These are truly ethical problems, but I do
not know of any way in which they can be solved except by politics or war.
All that I can ?nd to say on this subject is that an ethical opinion can only be
defended by an ethical axiom, but, if the axiom is not accepted, there is no
way of reaching a rational conclusion.
There is one approximately rational approach to ethical conclusions which
has a certain validity. It may be called the doctrine of compossibility. This
doctrine is as follows: among the desires that a man ?nds himself to possess,
there are various groups, each consisting of desires which may be grati?ed
together and others which con?ict. You may, for example, be a passionate
adherent of the Democratic Party, but it may happen that you hate the presi-
dential candidate. In that case, your love of the Party and your dislike of the
the autobiography of bertrand russell 504individual are not compossible. Or you may hate a man and love his son. In
that case, if they always travel about together, you will ?nd them, as a pair, not
compossible. The art of politics consists very largely in ?nding as numerous a
group of compossible people as you can. The man who wishes to be happy
will endeavour to make as large groups as he can of compossible desires the
rulers of his life. Viewed theoretically, such a doctrine a?ords no ultimate
solution. It assumes that happiness is better than unhappiness. This is
an ethical principle incapable of proof. For that reason, I did not consider
compossibility a basis for ethics.
I do not wish to be thought coldly indi?erent to ethical considerations.
Man, like the lower animals, is supplied by nature with passions and has a
di?culty in ?tting these passions together, especially if he lives in a close-knit
community. The art required for this is the art of politics. A man totally
destitute of this art would be a savage and incapable of living in civilised
society. That is why I have called my book Human Society in Ethics and Politics.
Though the reviews of the book were all that could be hoped, nobody paid
much attention to what I considered most important about it, the impossibil-
ity of reconciling ethical feelings with ethical doctrines. In the depths of my
mind this dark frustration brooded constantly. I tried to intersperse lighter
matters into my thoughts, especially by writing stories which contained an
element of fantasy. Many people found these stories amusing, though some
found them too stylised for their taste. Hardly anyone seems to have found
them prophetic.
Long before this, in the beginning of the century, I had composed various
stories and, later, I made up stories for my children to while away the tedious
climb from the beach to our house in Cornwall. Some of the latter have since
been written down, though never published. In about 1912, I had written a
novel, in the manner of Mallock’s New Republic, called The Perplexities of John
Forstice. Though the ?rst half of it I still think is not bad, the latter half seems
very dull to me, and I have never made any attempt to publish it. I also
invented a story that I never published.
From the time when Rutherford ?rst discovered the structure of the atom,
it had been obvious that sooner or later atomic force would become available
in war. This had caused me to foresee the possibility of the complete destruc-
tion of man through his own folly. In my story a pure scientist makes up a
little machine which can destroy matter throughout the universe. He has
known hitherto only his own laboratory and so he decides that, before using
his machine, he must ?nd out whether the world deserves to be destroyed.
He keeps his little machine in his waistcoat pocket and if he presses the knob
the world will cease to exist. He goes round the world examining whatever
seems to him evil, but everything leaves him in doubt until he ?nds himself
at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet and ?nds the nonsense talked by politicians
return to england 505unbearable. He leaps up and announces that he is about to destroy the world.
The other diners rush at him to stop him. He puts his thumb in his waistcoat
pocket – and ?nds that in changing for dinner he forgot to move the little
machine.
I did not publish this story at the time as it seemed too remote from reality.
But, with the coming of the atom bomb, its remoteness from reality van-
ished, so I wrote other stories with a similar moral, some of which ended in
atomic destruction, while others, which I called ‘nightmares’, exempli?ed
