BERTRAND RUSSELL: How do you do? INTERVIEWER: How do
you do, Lord Russel? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Won't you sit down? INTERVIEWER: Thank you. BERTRAND RUSSELL: Now what
are we going to talk about? INTERVIEWER: Well Lord
Russel, as you approach your 80th birthday, I think
we'd like you to tell us what you think you
have learned, and what you think you will never
learn in your career as a philosopher? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well,
there are some things that I don't think
I shall ever learn, and that indeed, I hope
I should never learn. I don't wish to learn to
change my hopes for the world. I'm prepared to
change my beliefs about the state of the
world, about what happens, but not about what I hope. About that, I hope
to remain constant. I think we might call the
subject of our talk, 80 years of changing beliefs
and unchanging hopes. It's very difficult for
anybody born since 1914 to realize how
profoundly different the world is now from what
it was when I was a child. The change has been
almost unbelievable. I try as best I can,
in spite of my years, to get used to living in
a world of atom bombs. A world where ancient empires
vanish like morning mist, where we have to
accustom ourselves to Asiatic self-procession,
the Communist menace. The world is
altogether, so different from what it was
when I was young, that it's an extraordinarily
difficult thing for an old man to live in such a world. I was born in 1872-- my parents died when
I was still an infant, and so I was brought
up by my grandparents. INTERVIEWER: Can you
tell us something about your grandfather? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Yes, I can tell you something about my grandfather. He was born in the early years
of the French Revolution. He was a member of parliament
while Napoleon was still on the throne. In common with all the
Whig followers of Fox, he thought English hostility
to Napoleon was excessive. And he visited Napoleon in Elba. It was he who
introduced the reform bill in 1832, which
started England on the road towards democracy. He was prime minister
during your Mexican War, during the revolutions of 1848. I remember him quite well-- but as you can see,
he belonged to an age that now seems rather removed. And the world where I was
young was a sullied world-- a world where all
kinds of things-- that have now disappeared-- were thought to going
to last forever. It didn't dawn on people
that they would cease. English people
certainly regarded English naval supremacy as
a sort of law of nature. Britannia ruled the waves-- it didn't occur
to us that might-- INTERVIEWER: Even
with this Bismark? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Bismarck
was regarded as a rascal, and was thought of as a
sort of uneducated farmer. But it was assumed that
the influence of Goethe and Schiller would
gradually bring Germany back to a more civilized
point of view. And moreover, we thought of
Germany as only a land power. Germany had, at
that time, no Navy. We weren't at all
afraid of Germany. In fact, numerable opinion
was more favorable to Germany than to France at that time. And Germany-- Bismarck himself
compared Germany and England to an elephant and a whale-- each formidable in
it's own element, but no danger to each other. And that was how we
felt-- so we were not afraid of Bismark at all. It was thought that
there was going to be ordered to progress
throughout the world. Gradually, every country was
going to take to Parliament-- there was going to be a
bicameral legislature and two parties, and it was
all going to be exactly like England everywhere--
all over the world. My grandmother used to
laugh, because one time he said to the Russian
ambassador, perhaps some day, you will have a
parliament in Russia. And he said, God forbid
my dear lady Russel. Except for the first word,
the Russian ambassador, at the present day, might
give the same answer. But that was the
assumption-- that it was all going to be orderly,
and all quite nice. The atmosphere,
apart from politics, it was one of Puritan piety-- very great piety,
very great austerity. We always had family
prayers at eight, and before family prayers,
I had to do half an hour's practice at the piano-- which I hated. Although there were eight
servants in the house, the food was always of
the utmost simplicity. And even of what there was, if
there was anything at all nice, I wasn't allowed to
have it, because it wasn't good for children
to eat nice things. For instance, there would be
rice pudding and apple tart-- the grownups had the apple tart,
and I had the rice pudding. And there was extreme
austerity in all those ways. My grandmother, until
she was over 70, would never sit-in an arm
chair until after dinner-- never. It's almost gone out-- that
sort of austere living by well to do people, which in those
days was fairly common. INTERVIEWER: When did
you get to Cambridge? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Oh, I got
to Cambridge when I was 18. And that, of course, was a
new world to me completely. I, for the first
time, met people who, when I said anything
that I really thought, he didn't think it absurd. I'd learned to tell them to
say almost nothing about what I really thought. People had a horror
of philosophy, which interested me. And they would say, every
time philosophy was mentioned, philosophy is summed up
completely in these two questions-- what is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter. And at about the sixtieth
repetition of this remark, I ceased to be amused by it. When I got to Cambridge, it
was a great comfort to me to find people who didn't
regard philosophy as absurd. So I was very, very happy
when I first got to Cambridge. I quickly got to know
a great many people who became my lifelong friends. Most of them, I'm sorry
to say, are dead now, but those who are still
alive are still my friends. INTERVIEWER: You started with
mathematics, didn't you-- and then moved to philosophy? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
That is so, yes. I did three years mathematics
and one year's philosophy at Cambridge. I had only done mathematics
before going to Cambridge. INTERVIEWER: What caused
your interest in philosophy? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Well, two things-- two very different things caused
my interest in philosophy. On the one hand, I
wanted to understand the principles of mathematics. I observed that all the proofs
of mathematical propositions that were taught
me were obviously fallacious-- they didn't really
prove what they said they did. And I wanted to know whether
there is any truth in the world to teach now. And I thought if there is any,
it's probably in mathematics. But it's not in mathematics
as I was taught it. And so I tried to find
out some truth there. The other thing that made
me interested in philosophy was the hope that I
might find some basis for religious belief. INTERVIEWER: And
did you find it? BERTRAND RUSSELL: No, in
the mathematical part, I hope, I was fairly satisfied. But in the other
part, no, not at all. For a time I found a
certain satisfaction in the platonic
eternal world of ideas, which has a sort
of religious flavor and gave me a
certain satisfaction. But then I came
to the conclusion that that was nonsense. And I was left without
any satisfaction to that-- except of my desires
to remain so. So it-- as far as
that goes, philosophy proved washed out to me. But not on the side of
technical basis mathematics. INTERVIEWER: Wasn't
it about here that you entered into what you
called a life of disagreements? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Yes. I disagreed, firstly, with my
people about both mathematics and about philosophy. They cared only about virtue-- they thought virtue
was the only thing of importance in the world. Mathematics therefore,
was unimportant because it has no
ethical content, and philosophy was
positively pernicious because they thought
it undermined virtue. So on that point, I had a strong
disagreement with my people. But as regards to
that, of course, that disagreement was, as far as
my personal life was concerned, was solved by my living
among academic people who didn't take that view-- so that I got again into a
circle of people with whom I was quite at home. But that was brought to
an end by the first war, where I took a pacifist line-- I was against the first war. I was not against the second-- some people think that this is
an inconsistency, but it isn't. I never during the
first war, said that I was against all war, I
said I was against that war. And I still hold that view-- I think that the first
war was a mistake, and I think England's
participation in it was a mistake. I think if that
hadn't happened, you would not have had
the communists, you would not have
had the Nazis. You would of not had
the Second World War, you would not had the
threat of a third. The world would have been a
very much better place, I think. Germany in the time of the
Kaiser was not uncivilized. There was a certain amount
of suppression of opinion, but less than there now is-- everywhere except in
England and Scandinavia. So it really wasn't very bad. For propaganda purposes,
the Kaiser's government was presented as dreadful,
but that was only talk-- it was really true. INTERVIEWER: Your opinions
today in regard to Russia are not altogether friendly. Did you always feel that
way about the Bolsheviks? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Yes. And that caused another
violent disagreement. Into my pacifism
during the first war, I became estranged from what you
might call conventional people. And then I went to Russia
in 1920 and found that I abominated the
Soviet government-- thought they were
dreadful people-- dreadful people already,
and becoming more so, and sure to go on
becoming more so. And so then I had to
break with all the people who endured my pacifism-- who all liked Russia,
or thought they did. So I was left in a very
great isolation at that time. However, I escaped
some of the pain of it by going to China where I
spent a very happy year-- I liked the Chinese very much. And there I found people
that I could agree with, that I could like. INTERVIEWER: Any
conclusions about China? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Oh, I
don't know about conclusions. I don't think I came to
any particular conclusions. I continue to think, as
I had thought before, that democracy is the best
form of government where it will work. It didn't work very
well in China-- it wasn't working at all. And one could see that
it wouldn't work there. They hadn't the
political experience. But I thought it would
work there in time, and I dare say it would have
done if circumstances had been a little more propitious. INTERVIEWER: On your return,
the focus of your interests changed, didn't it? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Yes. Going to the birth of
my two elder children, I became very much
interested in education. And at first, especially in
education in the very early years, I didn't like the
old fashioned schools for a number of reasons. I didn't altogether like
the progressive schools, though in some respects
I thought them much better than the older ones. But some things about
progressive schools, at least about most progressive schools,
that I didn't feel right-- I thought they didn't pay
enough attention to instruction. It seems to me that in our
technically complex world, you can't play
any important part unless you have a very
considerable amount of actual knowledge. And I don't think that
most children will acquire much knowledge unless there is
a certain amount of discipline in school. I think that the real
discipline required for acquiring knowledge
ought to be insisted upon-- and isn't sufficiently
insisted upon in a good many modern
schools that I know. INTERVIEWER: Did you
change any of your opinions in that regard? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well,
I suppose to some degree. I tried running a
school of my own, because I wasn't satisfied
with other schools. I haven't the talents
of an administrator, and I wasn't satisfied with
the school that I tried to run. Fortunately, it was
just about that time a certain modern school
that I was interested in became, I thought,
quite good enough-- and I was satisfied with that. I have, I suppose,
changed my opinions-- not only about education, but
about a good many things-- as a result of seeing the
kind of nefarious things that people do. I think that freedom is not
a panacea for all things. I think there are a good
many matters in which freedom should be restrained. Some of them things in
which it's not sufficiently restrained at present-- in the relations
between nations, there ought to be less freedom
than there is, I think. And to some degree, this
applies in modern education too. I think that some
progressive schools certainly have more freedom than
you ought to have. There are some freedoms
that I think very desirable in education. Now, in the old
fashioned school, if a child uses a
swear word, it's thought worse than if he
commits an unkind action-- and that seems to me absurd. I think that clearly, the
unkind action matters more. In that sort of way, I don't
like the old fashioned way. I also think that
children should be free to explore the
facts of life to a degree that they're not when
they're brought up in an old fashioned way. I think there should
be free speech-- there are a number of
things that I like very much about modern education. But both in education
and in other matters, I think that freedom must have
very definite limitations-- where you come to things
that are definitely harmful to other
people, or things that prevent you yourself
from being useful, such as lack of knowledge. So there are those respects
in which I suppose, I should lay less stress on
freedom than in former times. INTERVIEWER: Do you still
believe in the importance of abstract philosophy? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Well, now that's a very difficult question. I have myself a passion
for clarity, and exactness, and sharp outlines. For some reason that
I've never understood, this makes people think that
I have no passions, that I'm a cold fish. I don't know why, but it does
cause people to think that. I don't think that's
altogether together just. So that's neither
here nor there. But I do like clarity
and exact thinking. And I believe that very
important to mankind because when you allow
yourself to think inexactly, your prejudices, your bias, your
self-intuition comes in in ways you don't notice, and you do
bad things without knowing that you're doing them-- self-deception is very easy. So that I do think clear
thinking immensely important. But I don't think philosophy,
in the old fashioned sense, is quite the thing the
world needs nowadays. I think the needs of the
world are different from that. INTERVIEWER: Well, just what
do you feel today's needs are? BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Well, of course, the needs depend on what
the person's capacities are. But if I were now, at
this moment, a young man-- whether in England
or in America-- I should not take
to philosophy, I should think there were other
things better to take too. If I had the necessary capacity,
I think I would be a physicist. If my capacities didn't
run in that direction, I should think that
history, psychology-- mass psychology,
especially-- theory of politics, things
of that sort are much better worth working
at than pure philosophy. And it's that sort of
thing that I should take too now if I were now young. INTERVIEWER: Lord
Russell, what do you think the world needs
to reach a happier state? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well, I think
there are three things that are needed if the world is to
adapt itself to the Industrial Revolution. The troubles we
are suffering now, are essentially troubles
due to adapting ourselves to a new phase of human life-- namely the industrial phase. And I think three things
are necessary if people are to live happily in
the industrial phase-- one of these is
world government. The second is an approximate
economic equality between different
parts of the world. And the third is a nearly
stationary population. I'd like to say a little
about each of those. As to world government,
the world government should be, of course,
a federal government-- leaving a very great
deal of freedom to the individual
national governments. And only those things controlled
by the world government, which are absolutely necessary
for the avoidance of war. The most important, and the
most difficult of these, is armed forces. All the important
weapons of war will have to be in the hands of
the international government, and of it alone. When that happens, war will
become practically impossible. And if war were impossible,
mankind could go ahead. If war is not impossible, every
advance in scientific technique means an advance in mass murder,
and is therefore undesirable. But if, once world
peace were achieved, it would be just the opposite-- that's the first point. Now, I come on to
the question of approximate economic equality. As things stand at the present,
Western Europe, and still more the United States of America,
have a higher standard of life. On the whole, the great
majority of mankind live fairly comfortably from
a material point of view. Asia, on the other hand, lives
in very, very grave poverty-- so does most of Africa. And the moment people
are sufficiently educated to be aware of these facts,
the inevitable result is a great development
of envy in the poorer parts of the world. That envy is a cause of
unrest, and inevitably makes world peace precarious. There's only one way
of dealing with it, which is to produce
approximate economic equality-- of course, it's a long
story but it can be done. The third point about
population is very vital indeed. The food supply of the world-- it tends at present to diminish
through the [INAUDIBLE] of soil. It tends, of course,
also to increase through various
technical advances. But those two are
not balanced, so that on the whole, the food
produced of the world does not increase appreciably. Now, that means that unless
everybody is to be very poor-- especially if you have
economic equality-- unless everybody
is to be very poor, there must be not more
people to be fed-- not many more than
there are now. And therefore, you've got to get
approximate economic equality-- approximate proximity
equality of population-- and approximately
stationary population. Otherwise, those
parts of the world where the population
increases fast will want to go
to war with those where it increases slowly. INTERVIEWER: That
brings us precisely to the problem of Asia,
and what part Asia will play in the immediate future. BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well,
Asia, first of all, has risen to the
point of education-- some Asians have--
where it is not prepared any longer to be
subservient to the white man. It hasn't noticed that
Russians are white. If it had, it would
take a different line. But it seems to think that
Russians are yellow, or black, or some other color. And I think our propaganda ought
to be mainly devoted to saying only, Russians also are white. I believe that would be
the effective propaganda to use in Asia-- but I'll pass that point by. Asia, clearly, is going to claim
equality with the white man. And it's perfectly futile-- absolutely futile-- for the
white man to resist that game. It will infallibly win-- infallibly. And we ought, therefore, to
concede it graciously at once before we're driven
to it-- to concede complete equality to Asia. But if Asia is not to
overwhelm the rest of the world with a vast flood of
population and poverty, Asia must live up to
its responsibilities, and must learn
the sort of things we have learned
in the West, which is how to maintain a roughly
stationary population. And if they can't learn that,
which I fully believe they can learn-- and learn quickly-- much
more quickly than most people think-- if they can't learn
that, they will not have won their
claim to equality. INTERVIEWER: Lord Russell,
speaking as of today, can you see the influence
of any one philosopher more than any other one? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well, I
suppose in recent years, the most important
influence has been Marx. If you would dignify him
with the name of philosopher, I should hardly like to
dignify him so myself, but I suppose he must
count in the list. And he certainly has had more
influence than anybody else. INTERVIEWER: For those
of us who reject Marx, can you offer any
positive philosophy to help us toward a
more hopeful future? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well, that-- you see, I think one of
the troubles of the world has been the habit of
dogmatically believing something or other. And I think all these
matters are full of doubt, and the rational man will not
be too sure that he's right. I think we ought always
to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish
people dogmatically to believe any philosophy,
not even mine-- not even mine. No. I think we should
accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt. What I do think is this-- that if a philosophy
is to bring happiness, it should be inspired
by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired
by a kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he
wanted the happiness of the proletariat-- what he really wanted was the
unhappiness of the Bourgeois. And it was because of
that negative element, because of that hate element,
that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy which
is to do good, must be one inspired by
kindly feeling, and not by unkindly feeling. INTERVIEWER: Summing
up, Lord Russell-- do you feel that there is
hope for the world today? BERTRAND RUSSELL: Well, I do. I feel it very strongly. But how far that is really
a rational conviction, and how far it's
temperamental, I can't say. But I do most strongly
feel that there is hope. There may be very dreadful
times ahead of us-- I daresay there are. But I still believe-- I believe most firmly,
that through whatever pain and suffering,
mankind will emerge through these dreadful
things, and will emerge into some world that will
be happier than any world that has existed in the past. I am firmly persuaded of that.
