Bertrand Russell : Enjoyment of Beauty and Knowledge

Bertrand Russell

Selected Papers

MORAL STANDARDS AND SOCIAL WELL-BEING

Enjoyment of Beauty.

On this subject it is not necessary to say much, as the defects of industrial civilization in this respect are generally recognized. It may, I think, be taken as agreed that industrialism, as it exists now, destroys beauty, creates ugliness, and tends to destroy artistic capacity. None of these are essential characteristics of industrialism. They spring from two sources: first, that industrialism is new and revolutionary; secondly, that it is competitive and commercial.

The result of the first is that people do not aim at permanence in industrial products, and are loath to lavish much care on something that may be superseded by tomorrow. The result of the second is that manufacturers value their wares, not for their intrinsic excellence, but for the profit to be made out of them, which is, roughly, the excess of their apparent value above what they are really worth, so that every defect not evident at first sight is advantageous to the producer. It is obvious that both these causes of ugliness might be expected to be absent from an industrialism which was stereotyped and socialistic, since it would be neither revolutionary nor worked for profit. It therefore remains only to consider the third point, namely, artistic capacity.

It would seem, from the history of art, that ninetenths of artistic capacity, at least, depends upon tradition, and one-tenth, at most, upon individual merit. All the great flowering periods of art have come at the end of a slowly maturing tradition. There has, of course, been no time for industrialism to generate a tradition, and perhaps, if the absence of tradition were the only thing at fault, we could wait calmly for the operation of time. But I fear that the other element, individual artistic merit, without which no good tradition can be created, can hardly exist in an atmosphere of industrialized commercialism.

Commerce which is not industrial is often extraordinarily favorable to art. Athens, Venice, Florence, are noteworthy examples. But commerce which is industrial seems to have quite different artistic results. This comes probably from the utilitarian attitude which it generates. An artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve for the business of life. To the ordinary man, grass is always green, but to the artist it is all sorts of different colors according to circumstances.

This sort of thing, in anybody who is not already a famous artist, strikes the practical business man as a waste of time; it interferes with standardizing and cataloguing. The result is that, although eminent artists are feted and paid highly, the artistic attitude of mind is not tolerated in the young. A modern industrial community, when it wants an artist, has to import him from abroad; it then pays him such vast sums that his head is turned and he begins to like money better than art. When the whole world has adopted commercial industrialism, the artistic habit of mind will everywhere be stamped out in youth by people who cannot see any value in it unless its possessor is already labeled as a celebrity. This points to the same requirements as we found before; a society which is stable as regards the material side of life and the methods of production, where industrialism has ceased to be competitive and is used to make life more leisurely instead of more strenuous. And the first step toward this end is the general diffusion of a less energetic conception of the good life.

Knowledge.

The strongest case for commerdal industrialism can be made out under the head of scientific knowledge. Since the industrial revolution there has been an enormous increase both in the general level of education and in the number of men devoted to learning and research. The importance of science for industrial progress is very evident, and all industrial states encourage scientific research. But even in this sphere the utilitarian habit of mind inseparable from our present system has deleterious effects, which are only beginning to be evident Unless some people love knowledge for its own sake, quite independently of its possible uses, the new discoveries will only concern the working out of ideas inherited from disinterested investigators. Mendelism is now studied by hosts of agriculturists and stock-breeders, but Mendel was a monk who spent his leisure enjoying his peasblossoms. A million years of practical agriculturists would never have discovered Mendelism.

Wireless is of great practical importance: it facilitates slaughter in war, the dissemination of journalistic falsehood in time of peace, and the broadcasting of trivialities to relieve the tedium of evening hours not devoted to success. But the men who made it possible — Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz — were none of them the least interested in furthering this remarkable enrichment of human life; they were men solely interested in trying to understand physical processes, and it can hardly be said that the existence of industrialism helped them even indirectly. The modern study of the structure of the atom may have a

profound effect upon industrial processes, but those who are engaged upon it are very little interested in this possible future effect of their work. It seems likely that the utilitarianism of commercial industry must ultimately kill the pure desire for knowledge, just as it kills the analogous artistic impulse.

In America, where the more utilitarian aspects of science are keenly appreciated, no great advance in pure theory has been made. None of the fundamental discoveries upon which practical applications depend have been made in America. It seems probable that, as the point of view appropriate to commercial industry spreads, utilitarianism will make such fundamental discoveries more and more rare, until at last those who love knowledge for its own sake come to be classified in youth as "morons" and kept in institutions for harmless lunatics.

This, however, is not one of the main points I wish to make. There are, in fact, two such points: first, that pure science is infinitely more valuable than its applications; secondlyj that its applications, so far, have been in the main immeasurably harmful, and will only cease to be so when men have a less strenuous outlook on life. To take the second point first: Science, hitherto, has been used for three purposes: to increase the total production of commodities; to make wars more destructive; and to substitute trivial amusements for those that had some artistic or hygienic value.

Increase in total production, though it had its importance a hundred years ago, has now become faf less important than increase of leisure and the wise direction of production. On this point it is not necessary to enlarge further. The increasing destructiveness of wars also needs no comment. for trivial amusements: think of the substitution of the cinema for the theater; think of the difference between the gramophone and the really beautiful songs of Russian peasants; think of the difference between watching a great football match and playing in a small one. Owing to our belief that work is what matters, we have become unable to make out amusements nothing but trivial.

This is part of the price we had to pay for puritanism; it is no accident that the only great industrial countries are Protestant. People whose outlook on life Is more leisurely have a higher standard for their amusements: they like good plays, good music, and so on, not merely something that enables them to pass the time vacuously. So far, however, science has only intruded into the world of amusement in ways that have made it more trivial and less artistic. Nor can this be prevented so long as men think that only work is important.

As for the greater value of pure rather than applied science, that is a matter which goes deeper, but which it is difficult to argue. Applied science, while men retain their present ideals, has the sort of effects we have been considering, which I for my part find it very difficult to admire. Pure sdence — the understanding of natural processes, and the discover — of how the universe is constructed — seems to me the most godlike thing that men do. When I am tempted (as I often am) to wish the human race wiped out by some passing comet, I think of scientific knowledge and of art; these two things seem to make our existence not wholly futile. But the uses of science, even at the best, are on a lower plane. A philosophy which values them more than science itself is gross and cannot in the long run be otherwise than destructive of science.

On all our heads, therefore, we are led to the conclusion that our social system, our prevailing habits of mind, and our so-called moral ideals are destructive of what IS excellent. If excellence is to survive, we must become more leisurely, more just, less utilitarians, less "progressive".

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