“Western Civilisation,” pages 118-131
If we want to understand our civilisation, the tools that we have at hand are those of history, anthropology, and travel. All of them have a tendency to tell us more about the researcher than about the civilisation, however. Anthropologists who study savages can make them noble, or bloodthirsty, or what have you: “the savage is an obliging fellow who does whatever is necessary for the anthropologist’s theories [p. 118].” But we must work with the tools at our disposal.
Civilisation is marked by forethought. [Russell later devotes more time to forethought in Human Society in Ethics and Politics – RBR.] We can grasp the notion of forethought by considering activities that involve current pain but hold the prospect of future reward. The higher the pain, the lower the future pleasure, and the longer the interval between pain and pleasure, the greater the forethought that is required for such activities to go forward. Society might display a high level of forethought, even though individuals do not; for instance, it might be the case that the rulers reap the future pleasure, but require the minions to contribute the current pain. Collective forethought is significant in industrialized societies, which abound in projects such as railroads and harbors that take many years of nurturing to yield fruit. [A bit surprised that Russell doesn’t mention the opposite time profile, that associated with tempting or addictive goods, of current pleasure paired with some probability of future pain – RBR.]
Ancient Egyptians laboriously embalmed bodies with the view to a resurrection in 10,000 years, so in that sense their planning horizon more than equaled that of today’s industrial societies. Their efforts indicate that civilisation advances not just through forethought but through knowledge, so that those present pains really do stand a chance of paying off down the road. Nonetheless, even patience that is not well-informed can inculcate habits that can build civilisations, just as Puritan efforts to postpone pleasures [those addictive goods! – RBR] until the next life helped to spur economic investment. But a working definition of civilisation is: “A manner of life due to the combination of knowledge and forethought [p. 119].”
Civilisation, then, begins with agriculture and animal domestication. Traditionally, there has been separation and even dissonance between agricultural and pastoral societies, and agricultural societies have tended to have more developed civilisations. (The biblical tale of Cain and Abel swims against the tide, intending to illustrate the superior virtue of shepherds.) Prior to industrialization, the agriculture-based civilisations around the world were more similar than they are now; “Science and industrialism are nowadays the distinctive marks of Western civilisation…[p. 120].”
Pre-industrial Western civilisation began to differentiate itself through the Greek inventions of geometry and deduction. The Greeks had many other successes (in art, for instance, and in empirical methods), but these were either lost or undeveloped, and hence these excellencies did not lend themselves to traditions which became a distinctive part of Western civilisation.
The contributions of Greek reasoning and mathematics might have been lost due to Greek political incompetence, if the politically astute Romans were not able to preserve them. Roman political institutions allowed emperors to come and go with little effect on the workings of the empire’s bureaucracy. The Roman innovation was loyalty to the state, not to the emperor, and its legacy still contributes to Western political stability.
As Roman power waned, Christian institutions picked up some of the building blocks of modern Western civilisation, including ethics, reasoning (for the purposes of theology), and a bureaucracy featuring centralized control, along with a legal code. During the Middle Ages, these building blocks were dormant, and Chinese and Islamic civilisations eclipsed the West. The rise of the West and science remain mysterious, incapable of being explained solely by economic factors. (The decline of Spain concerned intolerance, not economics.) Though there have been some isolated cultural blooms, including the recent one in Western Europe, “The general rule is that civilisations decay except when they come in contact with an alien civilisation superior to their own [p. 122].” The times of spontaneous growth are hard to differentiate from the more common periods of stasis, so we are left with the notion that a handful of exceptional people can be enough to advance a civilisation. Their contributions must find fertile ground, but the ground has been more available than the geniuses who thrive in it. Without Newton, Kepler, and Galileo, we currently would live in a world that would resemble the world of the 1500’s. Stasis remains possible, if the well of talented people runs dry.
Representative democracy on a large scale is a valuable legacy of the Middle Ages, one that promotes stability; nonetheless, representative government has not proven to be a viable export to non-English speaking countries (except for France).
Western civilisation is unique in its political “cohesion.” This cohesion is rooted in patriotism, which took on its modern form when England was threatened by the Spanish Armada, and found “its first literary expression in Shakespeare [p. 124].” Japan caught up to the West in the sense of political cohesion in the 1800s.
Technological improvements in warfare strengthened the hands of governments, who have been able to establish this cohesion. The large number of workers needed to produce advanced weaponry pressure governments to maintain the support of significant segments of the population. One manner of doing so is through effective propaganda, and we can expect the persuasive arts to be enhanced through extensive governmental efforts.
Europe is engaged in a centuries-long transition, with science and patriotism contributing the centripetal force formerly supplied by Christianity. European-style outcomes cannot be assured in other cultures when science gains a foothold, because of differing foundations. Christianity, for instance, provides a basis for respect for the individual – a respect that science itself does not require. Science does not come packaged with any set of moral values. [Sam Harris disagrees – RBR.] Most of our moral ideas are inherited from a pre-industrial age, but over time they will adjust to conform with the realities of modernity. The rapid change in living conditions has led morality to lag: “the world has changed more in the last one hundred and fifty years than in the previous four thousand [p. 125].” [Writing in the 1840s, Friedrich Engels made a similar point: “Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like
every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin
but proportionally large agricultural population. To-day
it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half
million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry
that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of
the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense
population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce,
and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other
customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those
days.”] Many of our outdated codes view the relief of suffering – such as by condoning birth control – to be immoral. But in a science-based society, attempts to limit access to the tree of knowledge as a means to sustain outdated beliefs will not be effective. [The urge to censor knowledge to serve other goals comes up frequently in Russell’s writings.]
Our moral traditions derive from the level of the individual and from small groups, whereas modernity requires the cooperation of countless numbers of people. Thus the largest coherent group, the nation, takes on a moral character, and patriotism becomes a sort of religion, one for which people willingly sacrifice their lives.
Industrialization and large-scale organization threaten the status that individual liberty achieved in recent centuries. Bridges and skyscrapers are the work of many, while a work of art might be one person’s achievement. Those living individuals who gain respect generally do so for trivial accomplishments in sport or cinema.
Perhaps the greatest creations require an individual creator. Or, maybe the art that will be produced by groups in the future will exceed the solo masterpieces of the past. Much science already is best thought of as being accomplished at the laboratory level, not as the work of an individual scientist. At any rate, the rise of collective endeavor will surely entail some cost in the form of reduced individuality and assertiveness.
The Christian notion that each human has a soul has been a boon to individualism. [Russell raised this point again in Unpopular Essays.] Family connections tended to mitigate the extreme individualism that Christianity promotes, but families have weakened, and now the state provides the communal connection. It might be better if people were drawn to a broader aggregate, humanity writ large, but absent a major change such as a grave external threat to the globe, the psychological sympathies of people are hard to expand beyond the nation state. [Adam Smith made a similar claim in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (VI.II.27): “The state or sovereignty in which we have been born and educated, and under the protection of which we continue to live, is, in ordinary cases, the greatest society upon whose happiness or misery, our good or bad conduct can have much influence. It is accordingly, by nature, most strongly recommended to us.”]
The main elements in Western civilisation now are science and technology. Nonetheless, these building blocks will produce still larger effects in the future – note how long it took agriculture and the ideas associated with agriculture to spread across the globe. (Aristocratic classes are still stuck in the hunting stage of development.) It will be a long time before the ideas of industry fully replace those of agriculture. Nonetheless, the industrial mentality can spread rather quickly. In the US, agriculture itself is being industrialized. In countries like Russia and China, the backward peasantry is uneducated and illiterate – their children, therefore, can easily be captured by the industrial propaganda of the state, allowing for a rapid change in worldviews.
The rise of science and industry might be uncomfortable for some traditionalists, but their Western roots date at least to Rome, and can be seen in Plutarch’s account of Archimedes’s military inventions. “Energy, intolerance, and abstract intellect have distinguished the best ages in Europe from the best ages in the East [p. 129].” The persistence of Western intolerance sometimes is overlooked, despite the fate of Socrates and Plato’s rigid recommendations. [Plato’s intolerance is discussed by Russell elsewhere, too.] Many of the worst features of modern life existed in ancient Greece, including corruption, nationalism, and militarism. The Greeks were advantaged relative to us by not having an efficient police force, which meant that significant numbers of the best people were able to escape oppression.
The previous century and a half of emphasis on religious tolerance is an aberration in the West’s historical arc, and is giving way to a new round of racial and religious intolerance. Persecution in the West took off with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The Christians combined Jewish certitude of having the one true religion with Roman desires for world conquest and Greek capacities for finely grained thinking. The product was a degree of persecution that greatly surpassed that of the world’s other major religions, which often allowed non-coreligionist neighbors to live in peace.
So Fascism and Communism come by their intolerances honestly. Would someone opposed to government orthodoxy in modern Europe have fared any better in ancient Sparta, or in medieval Christendom? Europe has a brutal history: burning witches and killing those who refused to accept the existence of witches, destroying the Incas, following a 19th century pope who disclaimed any human duty to non-human animals. “I am afraid Europe, however intelligent, has always been rather horrid, except in the brief period between 1848 and 1914 [p. 131].”
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
In Praise of Idleness, Halftime
In keeping with an RBR tradition, this halftime report on In Praise of Idleness comes well after the halfway mark of the book – though more than half of the chapters lie in the future.
One of the themes that comes through to me in the first “half” of In Praise of Idleness is how much of the thinking is consonant with Marxian ideas. I guess this should not be a surprise when reading an openly socialist thinker like Russell (who has much good to say about anarchism, too), but Russell’s direct comments on Marx tend to be rather critical. What are some Russellian echoes of Marxian ideas? The ethical positions of society, according to Marx, are those notions that suit the ruling class – and Russell claims that the idea that hard work is virtuous is one such position – as long as the hard work is done by others. (And the education system will attempt to sustain support for the existing order.) Even the Soviet Union, with its praise of the proletariat and its campaigns to enlist young people for manual toil, offers Russell a case in point. The reserve army of the unemployed is a feature of capitalism that, for Marx, helps keep the demands of laborers in line; for Russell, unemployment makes it appear that leisure time cannot possibly be evenly distributed. For Marx, work under capitalism is just a means to an end, as opposed to being what it should be, life itself, manifesting the human need for purposeful labor. Further, workers are required to work such long hours that they have no room for active leisure pursuits. Russell concurs on both points, along with the Marxian (and Millian) observation that machinery has not lightened the load for workers. Property ownership largely stems from military prowess, according to Russell, a’ la Marx’s primitive capitalist accumulation. (As Marx puts it, “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.”) Academic economists tend to be stooges of the rich and powerful, according to Russell. Marx was there first: “Though he [a capitalist] chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for it.” The state apparatus itself is captured to serve the interests of rich industrialists, according to Russell. For Marx, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
Marx and Russell share views about other features of the capitalist economy, too. They both recognize the capitalist tendency for large swings in the business cycle and pressure to extend the working day, while they both also seem to believe that economies of scale in production are always available, so that larger producers can out-compete small producers (p. 100). [It turns out that is not always the case.] Of course, Marx and Russell differ on many points. Marx has little good to say about the profit motive within an advanced capitalist system (though the early stages of capitalism create wonders). Russell is more nuanced, suggesting that there are areas where free enterprise delivers the goods and other areas where it does not. For instance, the fact that housework lies outside the profit-oriented economy leads to worse conditions for women. But those areas where the unregulated pursuit of profits fails society are legion for Russell:
(1) The profit motive does not inspire the type of architecture that promotes wellbeing. Desirable architectural reform cannot take place without shielding design from the profit motive, that is, without a species of socialism in this realm.
(2) Relatedly, the profit motive ruins the aesthetics of suburbs. Along with the ugly suburbs, the chase for profits produces anxious wives and unhealthy children.
(3) Profit-seeking in the financial sector leads to anti-social behavior. One element of this anti-social behavior is the promulgation of self-serving myths (which, as noted above, are parroted by academics and other influential people). The policy ideas of people in the financial sector are as divorced from social wellbeing as are the policy ideas of people who are proficient in the military arts. [This is reminiscent not only of Marx but of Adam Smith’s analysis of the disconnect between the interests of capitalists and social wellbeing: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public… The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."]
(4) Speaking of the military arts, war is promoted by the profit-seeking of industrialists. [And Smith again on the colonies: “A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers all the goods with which these could supply them. For the sake of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might afford our producers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expence of maintaining and defending that empire. For this purpose, and for this purpose only, in the two last wars, more than two hundred millions have been spent, and a new debt of more than a hundred and seventy millions has been contracted over and above all that had been expended for the same purpose in former wars.”]
(5) The unemployment that comes from the volatility of investment represents a social cost that is not taken into account by profit-maximizing decisions within heavy industry. Society does not thrive, then, when the commanding heights of the economy pursue profit in an unregulated fashion. Indeed, poverty is perpetuated by excessive devotion to profits.
(6) The profit motive has not been a major influence on education, but to the extent that it has had an influence, the tendency is for that influence to be detrimental.
(7) The arts cannot thrive when they are driven by profit considerations alone.
Russell’s case for socialism is non-Marxian, it does not follow from class war or even conceptions of fairness to workers. Rather, Russell sees socialism – which includes state control of the commanding heights and some income protection for the poor and unemployed – as being a necessary part of a rational response to the conditions that accompany large-scale industrialization. Why should willing workers suffer because of macroeconomic forces over which they have no control? [Once again, I am reminded of Engels: “Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow.”] Surely the unavoidable risks of unemployment should be spread through society, not forced to be borne by the few (in relative terms) who are unlucky. Also for Russell, wealth differentials are tolerable, as long as they do not translate into power differentials. Russell’s vision brings to mind the views of the philosopher Michael Walzer, who in Spheres of Justice (p. 127), also finds that income differentials become a problem when they allow for people to become powerful outside of the economic sphere: “If we succeeded absolutely in barring the conversion of money into political power, for example, then we might not limit its accumulation or alienation at all. As things are, we have strong reasons to limit both of these – reasons that have less to do with the marginal utility of money than with its extra-mural effectiveness.”
Russell is perhaps most stridently non-Marxian (or at least non-Leninist) in his belief that socialism cannot be established in a sustainable fashion through force; persuasion is the route to the rationalization of capitalism that Russellian socialism represents.
Another thinker who came to mind on a few occasions in the first half of In Praise of Idleness is (Bertrand’s friend) John Maynard Keynes. Russell echoes Keynes’s views on the unnecessary and perverse severity of the Versailles Treaty. Russell is prescient in foreseeing another European war on the horizon, stoked in part by the German reaction to the Versailles Treaty. Russell also predicts that the war will be a losing one for Germany, despite initial German victories, and that neglect of America will once again be the cause of German military over-reaching – pretty impressive for an essay published in 1935.
Perhaps the most famous quote of Keynes’s is: “…the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Russell’s essay “The Ancestry of Fascism” seeks to trace out those political philosophers whose ideas helped spark the rise of fascism. Among the many names that Russell identifies, Johann Gottlieb Fichte seems to hold what, in other contexts, might be termed pride of place.
One fun Russellian nugget from the first half of In Praise of Idleness involves a story of how a town’s butcher is so spiteful towards his competitors that he converts the town to vegetarianism – and thereby destroys his own livelihood along with those of his competitors. This story has a Keynesian, beggar-thy-neighbor flavor, and it occurs within the Keynesian context, too, of foreign trade controls.
A second memorable moment is yet another rather depressing depiction of domestic life. Suburban existence even provides fertile ground for fascist ideologies to flourish, as the lack of public life in suburbia combines with hierarchical structures at work to preclude other outlets for men to exercise power. (In Human Society in Ethics and Politics, Russell compares human suburban existence unfavorably to that of jungle-dwelling monkeys.)
A third small point that I think I will remember from the first half of In Praise of Idleness is that fascism, for Russell, is diabolical both in what it hopes to achieve and how it hopes to get there. [Elsewhere, Russell similarly characterizes Marx as someone “who substituted Prussian discipline for freedom as both the means and the end of revolutionary action.”] And while Russell correctly foresees its eventual military defeat, he also sees as fascism’s intellectual opponents two rather different bodies of thought, Bentham-style utilitarianism and Russell-style socialism. If Russell is right about socialism, however, then utilitarianism and socialism are quite closely allied: socialism brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
On to the second half of In Praise of Idleness…
One of the themes that comes through to me in the first “half” of In Praise of Idleness is how much of the thinking is consonant with Marxian ideas. I guess this should not be a surprise when reading an openly socialist thinker like Russell (who has much good to say about anarchism, too), but Russell’s direct comments on Marx tend to be rather critical. What are some Russellian echoes of Marxian ideas? The ethical positions of society, according to Marx, are those notions that suit the ruling class – and Russell claims that the idea that hard work is virtuous is one such position – as long as the hard work is done by others. (And the education system will attempt to sustain support for the existing order.) Even the Soviet Union, with its praise of the proletariat and its campaigns to enlist young people for manual toil, offers Russell a case in point. The reserve army of the unemployed is a feature of capitalism that, for Marx, helps keep the demands of laborers in line; for Russell, unemployment makes it appear that leisure time cannot possibly be evenly distributed. For Marx, work under capitalism is just a means to an end, as opposed to being what it should be, life itself, manifesting the human need for purposeful labor. Further, workers are required to work such long hours that they have no room for active leisure pursuits. Russell concurs on both points, along with the Marxian (and Millian) observation that machinery has not lightened the load for workers. Property ownership largely stems from military prowess, according to Russell, a’ la Marx’s primitive capitalist accumulation. (As Marx puts it, “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.”) Academic economists tend to be stooges of the rich and powerful, according to Russell. Marx was there first: “Though he [a capitalist] chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for it.” The state apparatus itself is captured to serve the interests of rich industrialists, according to Russell. For Marx, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
Marx and Russell share views about other features of the capitalist economy, too. They both recognize the capitalist tendency for large swings in the business cycle and pressure to extend the working day, while they both also seem to believe that economies of scale in production are always available, so that larger producers can out-compete small producers (p. 100). [It turns out that is not always the case.] Of course, Marx and Russell differ on many points. Marx has little good to say about the profit motive within an advanced capitalist system (though the early stages of capitalism create wonders). Russell is more nuanced, suggesting that there are areas where free enterprise delivers the goods and other areas where it does not. For instance, the fact that housework lies outside the profit-oriented economy leads to worse conditions for women. But those areas where the unregulated pursuit of profits fails society are legion for Russell:
(1) The profit motive does not inspire the type of architecture that promotes wellbeing. Desirable architectural reform cannot take place without shielding design from the profit motive, that is, without a species of socialism in this realm.
(2) Relatedly, the profit motive ruins the aesthetics of suburbs. Along with the ugly suburbs, the chase for profits produces anxious wives and unhealthy children.
(3) Profit-seeking in the financial sector leads to anti-social behavior. One element of this anti-social behavior is the promulgation of self-serving myths (which, as noted above, are parroted by academics and other influential people). The policy ideas of people in the financial sector are as divorced from social wellbeing as are the policy ideas of people who are proficient in the military arts. [This is reminiscent not only of Marx but of Adam Smith’s analysis of the disconnect between the interests of capitalists and social wellbeing: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public… The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."]
(4) Speaking of the military arts, war is promoted by the profit-seeking of industrialists. [And Smith again on the colonies: “A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers all the goods with which these could supply them. For the sake of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might afford our producers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expence of maintaining and defending that empire. For this purpose, and for this purpose only, in the two last wars, more than two hundred millions have been spent, and a new debt of more than a hundred and seventy millions has been contracted over and above all that had been expended for the same purpose in former wars.”]
(5) The unemployment that comes from the volatility of investment represents a social cost that is not taken into account by profit-maximizing decisions within heavy industry. Society does not thrive, then, when the commanding heights of the economy pursue profit in an unregulated fashion. Indeed, poverty is perpetuated by excessive devotion to profits.
(6) The profit motive has not been a major influence on education, but to the extent that it has had an influence, the tendency is for that influence to be detrimental.
(7) The arts cannot thrive when they are driven by profit considerations alone.
Russell’s case for socialism is non-Marxian, it does not follow from class war or even conceptions of fairness to workers. Rather, Russell sees socialism – which includes state control of the commanding heights and some income protection for the poor and unemployed – as being a necessary part of a rational response to the conditions that accompany large-scale industrialization. Why should willing workers suffer because of macroeconomic forces over which they have no control? [Once again, I am reminded of Engels: “Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow.”] Surely the unavoidable risks of unemployment should be spread through society, not forced to be borne by the few (in relative terms) who are unlucky. Also for Russell, wealth differentials are tolerable, as long as they do not translate into power differentials. Russell’s vision brings to mind the views of the philosopher Michael Walzer, who in Spheres of Justice (p. 127), also finds that income differentials become a problem when they allow for people to become powerful outside of the economic sphere: “If we succeeded absolutely in barring the conversion of money into political power, for example, then we might not limit its accumulation or alienation at all. As things are, we have strong reasons to limit both of these – reasons that have less to do with the marginal utility of money than with its extra-mural effectiveness.”
Russell is perhaps most stridently non-Marxian (or at least non-Leninist) in his belief that socialism cannot be established in a sustainable fashion through force; persuasion is the route to the rationalization of capitalism that Russellian socialism represents.
Another thinker who came to mind on a few occasions in the first half of In Praise of Idleness is (Bertrand’s friend) John Maynard Keynes. Russell echoes Keynes’s views on the unnecessary and perverse severity of the Versailles Treaty. Russell is prescient in foreseeing another European war on the horizon, stoked in part by the German reaction to the Versailles Treaty. Russell also predicts that the war will be a losing one for Germany, despite initial German victories, and that neglect of America will once again be the cause of German military over-reaching – pretty impressive for an essay published in 1935.
Perhaps the most famous quote of Keynes’s is: “…the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Russell’s essay “The Ancestry of Fascism” seeks to trace out those political philosophers whose ideas helped spark the rise of fascism. Among the many names that Russell identifies, Johann Gottlieb Fichte seems to hold what, in other contexts, might be termed pride of place.
One fun Russellian nugget from the first half of In Praise of Idleness involves a story of how a town’s butcher is so spiteful towards his competitors that he converts the town to vegetarianism – and thereby destroys his own livelihood along with those of his competitors. This story has a Keynesian, beggar-thy-neighbor flavor, and it occurs within the Keynesian context, too, of foreign trade controls.
A second memorable moment is yet another rather depressing depiction of domestic life. Suburban existence even provides fertile ground for fascist ideologies to flourish, as the lack of public life in suburbia combines with hierarchical structures at work to preclude other outlets for men to exercise power. (In Human Society in Ethics and Politics, Russell compares human suburban existence unfavorably to that of jungle-dwelling monkeys.)
A third small point that I think I will remember from the first half of In Praise of Idleness is that fascism, for Russell, is diabolical both in what it hopes to achieve and how it hopes to get there. [Elsewhere, Russell similarly characterizes Marx as someone “who substituted Prussian discipline for freedom as both the means and the end of revolutionary action.”] And while Russell correctly foresees its eventual military defeat, he also sees as fascism’s intellectual opponents two rather different bodies of thought, Bentham-style utilitarianism and Russell-style socialism. If Russell is right about socialism, however, then utilitarianism and socialism are quite closely allied: socialism brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
On to the second half of In Praise of Idleness…
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
In Praise of Idleness, Chapter Seven, Part Two
“The Case for Socialism,” Part Two, pages 105-117
Picking up from Part One with the remainder of Russell’s nine arguments for socialism….
6. The Emancipation of Women and the Welfare of Young Children The economic dependence of women, whose housework is unremunerated, on their husbands cannot easily be remedied absent socialism. The state needs to see to the financial demands of children, and wives need to work outside of the house: architectural adjustments and the provision of nursery schools are part of the requisite reforms.
7. Art The privacy fetish undermines public art, and this predilection also can be overcome with socialism.
Commercial motives are holding back the development of cinema: some observers even believe that the apex of the cinematic art lies in Soviet Russia. Profit-motivated authors, too, temper their writing to preclude offense and produce pap to widen their appeal. The state monopoly of publishing that an insecure socialist state would offer could be worse [-- a concern that Russell expressed years earlier.] In a secure socialist state, however, more free time for creative activity, and a norm that anyone’s work can be published if the expenses are privately covered, would lead to more creativity than now exists.
8. Unprofitable Public Services There are many public goods, such as defense, that are poorly provided by individual, profit-oriented activity alone, and as a result, these goods are provided by the government. A recent addition has been public health measures, which the private enterprise fanatics have opposed, but which bring substantial benefits in practice. Private enterprise in this realm might involve blackmail via privately profitable threats to spread a plague: better that quarantine be a public mandate.
The scope for public provision of services has expanded, with education now being largely a public matter, though religious, charitable, and profit-oriented schools also exist. (“On the whole, the profit motive has had little influence on education, and that little bad [p. 108].”) Even areas dominated by private provision of goods and services are regulated by the government, and rightly so, as the spillover effects are often broad and long. Residents in one neighborhood of a city work in other neighborhoods, so multiple areas are affected through behavior that in itself is geographically isolated. Transport and economic development increase interdependence and undermine the self-sufficiency of towns and villages. Power stations have monopoly control, and unfettered, that control could be exercised in an extortionate fashion. Roads, railroads, and airplanes all advance, heightening geographical spillovers.
9. War War is too dangerous to risk, and socialism holds the potential to reduce the risk of war – which is not to say that war is a capitalist invention. Economic motives are traditionally prominent in war-making, but so are status motives: spirited men enjoy war, and enjoy that women like men who are successful soldiers. Global socialism would be an effective antidote to war, but socialism in the largest, most powerful countries, would also offer substantial protection.
The intellectual case against war is now strong and widely shared, bolstered by the sufferings of both the winners and the losers from the previous war [WWI]. The next war will involve even more damage and death to civilians. Entire cities can be destroyed, and Britain has lost its longstanding immunity against invasion.
Despite the broad desire for peace, further war is on the near horizon. “The proximate cause, of course, is the harshness of the Versailles Treaty, with the consequent growth of militant nationalism in Germany [p. 110].” Nonetheless, the next war likely will bring a still harsher peace, and the process will repeat itself. So the answer lies not in winning a war but by ending the causes of conflict, which primarily are economic.
Economies of scale help to stoke the rivalry. Large factories can undersell small factories, so manufacturers need access to a huge market to be profitable. The US domestic industry has such a market, but the manufacturers of Britain, France, and Germany do not. Further, much industrial demand (such as for steel) comes from armaments, so industries profit from international tensions. German and French steel makers believe that they will flourish when their country wins the next war (with the costs borne by others), though their unsurprising confidence is unwarranted. The valuable ore in Lorraine switched from German to French hands after the last war, providing an example of the economic benefits of victory, and making Germans keen for their turn.
The capture of the state by large industries is facilitated by their tapping into popular sentiments, such as fear or resentment. Sophisticated self-interest argues for cooperation among European nations in ways that can improve well-being generally, but voices of reason are drowned out by nationalistic cant – and the cant itself is stoked by those with a financial interest in keeping tensions high. This is the mechanism through which modern capitalism causes war: the drive for profits produces propaganda that appeals to the worser angels of our nature. [Smedley Butler’s phrase “War is a racket” still echoes today. – RBR] An international democratic socialism that conducted the affairs of large industry in the interests of society instead of for profits would eliminate this mechanism for militarism – and even a partial socialism, comprising the most powerful countries, would go a long way to ending militarism.
Beyond the nine advantages already adduced, socialism can mitigate other problems. Decentralized, profit-oriented investment decisions lead to the absurdity of investment booms followed by low prices and bankruptcies. [This was a major part of the Soviet critique of capitalism, as put forth, for instance, in their 1930 book aimed at explaining central planning to young people, New Russia’s Primer. – RBR] Under socialism, transitions from old to new technologies can be made gradual, with younger workers being retrained for the new jobs; further, shorter work days will keep unemployment low. Those who are unemployed but who are willing to work will not suffer financially from unemployment. And the productivity gains from technological improvements can be shared between higher living standards and increased leisure.
Economic dependence on other individuals will decline under socialism, replaced by both less uncertainty and the state as provider. Wives will not be dependent on their husbands, and children will be less dependent on the qualities of their parents.
Socialism holds the potential to be good for virtually everyone, by sharply limiting economic insecurity and by decreasing the likelihood of war. The belief of some communists that socialism can only be introduced at the point of a proletarian sword in a class war is unfounded. Socialism has developed in the minds of its opponents an unnecessary and unfortunate connection both to atheism and to tyrannical rule. Nonetheless, socialism is consistent with religious views of all stripes, and most tyrannies are of the reactionary sort (though in battling these regimes, socialism might be contaminated with some of their bad features). “But in countries which still permit some degree of free thought and free speech, I believe that the Socialist case can, with ardour and patience combined, be so presented as to persuade much more than half the population [p. 115].” Perhaps there will be counter-revolutionaries, but their numbers will be small, and overcoming their opposition will not induce a socialist tyranny. And if the majority is not in favor of socialism, then it should not be imposed, in keeping with standard practice in democratic societies. [This is a point Russell repeatedly made years earlier.]
Some people say that the slow, evolutionary methods of introducing socialism are unrealistic in a world where fascism has taken hold. This might be true in fascist countries themselves, but is not the case in France, Britain, and America. Indeed, both France and Britain have socialist political parties with considerable support. In Britain, the socialists could soon be in charge. But even in power, they will face obstacles to implementing their policies, and a forcible implementation will be a temptation. But again, force will be to no avail in making socialist policies lasting. Indeed, departures from democratic methods strengthen the hand of fascists, not socialists.
Picking up from Part One with the remainder of Russell’s nine arguments for socialism….
6. The Emancipation of Women and the Welfare of Young Children The economic dependence of women, whose housework is unremunerated, on their husbands cannot easily be remedied absent socialism. The state needs to see to the financial demands of children, and wives need to work outside of the house: architectural adjustments and the provision of nursery schools are part of the requisite reforms.
7. Art The privacy fetish undermines public art, and this predilection also can be overcome with socialism.
Commercial motives are holding back the development of cinema: some observers even believe that the apex of the cinematic art lies in Soviet Russia. Profit-motivated authors, too, temper their writing to preclude offense and produce pap to widen their appeal. The state monopoly of publishing that an insecure socialist state would offer could be worse [-- a concern that Russell expressed years earlier.] In a secure socialist state, however, more free time for creative activity, and a norm that anyone’s work can be published if the expenses are privately covered, would lead to more creativity than now exists.
8. Unprofitable Public Services There are many public goods, such as defense, that are poorly provided by individual, profit-oriented activity alone, and as a result, these goods are provided by the government. A recent addition has been public health measures, which the private enterprise fanatics have opposed, but which bring substantial benefits in practice. Private enterprise in this realm might involve blackmail via privately profitable threats to spread a plague: better that quarantine be a public mandate.
The scope for public provision of services has expanded, with education now being largely a public matter, though religious, charitable, and profit-oriented schools also exist. (“On the whole, the profit motive has had little influence on education, and that little bad [p. 108].”) Even areas dominated by private provision of goods and services are regulated by the government, and rightly so, as the spillover effects are often broad and long. Residents in one neighborhood of a city work in other neighborhoods, so multiple areas are affected through behavior that in itself is geographically isolated. Transport and economic development increase interdependence and undermine the self-sufficiency of towns and villages. Power stations have monopoly control, and unfettered, that control could be exercised in an extortionate fashion. Roads, railroads, and airplanes all advance, heightening geographical spillovers.
9. War War is too dangerous to risk, and socialism holds the potential to reduce the risk of war – which is not to say that war is a capitalist invention. Economic motives are traditionally prominent in war-making, but so are status motives: spirited men enjoy war, and enjoy that women like men who are successful soldiers. Global socialism would be an effective antidote to war, but socialism in the largest, most powerful countries, would also offer substantial protection.
The intellectual case against war is now strong and widely shared, bolstered by the sufferings of both the winners and the losers from the previous war [WWI]. The next war will involve even more damage and death to civilians. Entire cities can be destroyed, and Britain has lost its longstanding immunity against invasion.
Despite the broad desire for peace, further war is on the near horizon. “The proximate cause, of course, is the harshness of the Versailles Treaty, with the consequent growth of militant nationalism in Germany [p. 110].” Nonetheless, the next war likely will bring a still harsher peace, and the process will repeat itself. So the answer lies not in winning a war but by ending the causes of conflict, which primarily are economic.
Economies of scale help to stoke the rivalry. Large factories can undersell small factories, so manufacturers need access to a huge market to be profitable. The US domestic industry has such a market, but the manufacturers of Britain, France, and Germany do not. Further, much industrial demand (such as for steel) comes from armaments, so industries profit from international tensions. German and French steel makers believe that they will flourish when their country wins the next war (with the costs borne by others), though their unsurprising confidence is unwarranted. The valuable ore in Lorraine switched from German to French hands after the last war, providing an example of the economic benefits of victory, and making Germans keen for their turn.
The capture of the state by large industries is facilitated by their tapping into popular sentiments, such as fear or resentment. Sophisticated self-interest argues for cooperation among European nations in ways that can improve well-being generally, but voices of reason are drowned out by nationalistic cant – and the cant itself is stoked by those with a financial interest in keeping tensions high. This is the mechanism through which modern capitalism causes war: the drive for profits produces propaganda that appeals to the worser angels of our nature. [Smedley Butler’s phrase “War is a racket” still echoes today. – RBR] An international democratic socialism that conducted the affairs of large industry in the interests of society instead of for profits would eliminate this mechanism for militarism – and even a partial socialism, comprising the most powerful countries, would go a long way to ending militarism.
Beyond the nine advantages already adduced, socialism can mitigate other problems. Decentralized, profit-oriented investment decisions lead to the absurdity of investment booms followed by low prices and bankruptcies. [This was a major part of the Soviet critique of capitalism, as put forth, for instance, in their 1930 book aimed at explaining central planning to young people, New Russia’s Primer. – RBR] Under socialism, transitions from old to new technologies can be made gradual, with younger workers being retrained for the new jobs; further, shorter work days will keep unemployment low. Those who are unemployed but who are willing to work will not suffer financially from unemployment. And the productivity gains from technological improvements can be shared between higher living standards and increased leisure.
Economic dependence on other individuals will decline under socialism, replaced by both less uncertainty and the state as provider. Wives will not be dependent on their husbands, and children will be less dependent on the qualities of their parents.
Socialism holds the potential to be good for virtually everyone, by sharply limiting economic insecurity and by decreasing the likelihood of war. The belief of some communists that socialism can only be introduced at the point of a proletarian sword in a class war is unfounded. Socialism has developed in the minds of its opponents an unnecessary and unfortunate connection both to atheism and to tyrannical rule. Nonetheless, socialism is consistent with religious views of all stripes, and most tyrannies are of the reactionary sort (though in battling these regimes, socialism might be contaminated with some of their bad features). “But in countries which still permit some degree of free thought and free speech, I believe that the Socialist case can, with ardour and patience combined, be so presented as to persuade much more than half the population [p. 115].” Perhaps there will be counter-revolutionaries, but their numbers will be small, and overcoming their opposition will not induce a socialist tyranny. And if the majority is not in favor of socialism, then it should not be imposed, in keeping with standard practice in democratic societies. [This is a point Russell repeatedly made years earlier.]
Some people say that the slow, evolutionary methods of introducing socialism are unrealistic in a world where fascism has taken hold. This might be true in fascist countries themselves, but is not the case in France, Britain, and America. Indeed, both France and Britain have socialist political parties with considerable support. In Britain, the socialists could soon be in charge. But even in power, they will face obstacles to implementing their policies, and a forcible implementation will be a temptation. But again, force will be to no avail in making socialist policies lasting. Indeed, departures from democratic methods strengthen the hand of fascists, not socialists.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
In Praise of Idleness, Chapter Seven, Part One
“The Case for Socialism,” part one, pages 91-104
Chapter 7 is sufficiently long that following long-established RBR precedent, its summentary will be broken into two parts. This is part one…
Most current socialists are Marxists, and accept that a proletarian-based revolution is the only path to socialism. This dogma repels non-proletarian would-be sympathizers, and many non-proletarians think a preemptive strike against socialists might be better than waiting for their own defeat in the coming class war. Fascism draws some support in this fashion; more generally, the equating of socialism with Marxism makes it very hard for socialist ideas to make headway in the West.
Though I [Russell] am a fervent supporter of socialist ideas, for me, socialism is not fundamentally about class war or economic fairness. “I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race [p. 91].” The violence associated with a transition to socialism is not inherent to it, but is a byproduct of the attitudes of its intemperate supporters.
The definition of socialism includes state control of the commanding heights of the economy, as well as democratic control of the state. Marx and other early socialists would concur with these descriptions of socialism, but the Bolsheviks opted to limit political power to members of the party vanguard. Such a regime might be part of a transition to socialism, but a sustainable socialist system requires democracy to go along with social ownership of the economy. “Unless there is popular control, there can be no reason to expect the State to conduct its economic enterprises except for its own enrichment, and therefore exploitation will merely take a new form [p. 92].”
Some small-scale private enterprise, including construction and finance, is compatible with socialism. People can be personally wealthy, but they cannot be coupon clippers, as there will be no large publicly traded companies in which to invest, and such investments would be prohibited. Wealth disparities would be minimized when interest incomes are unavailable – but only disparities that do not confer power over other individuals would be permissible.
Socialism offers many advantages, but they probably would not be realizable if the socialism were achieved after a protracted, bitter, and militarized class war. The analysis here presupposes a largely peaceful transition to socialism. The path could be more peaceful if socialists would focus on the advantages of economic organization, as opposed to envy of the rich. Here are nine of the many arguments in support of socialism. [The numbering and the italicized titles of the pro-socialism arguments are copied directly from Russell, but I suppress quotation marks in this instance – RBR]:
1. The Breakdown of the Profit Motive The belief that the pursuit of profit would lead to proper decisions about what and how much to produce once was reasonable, but no longer is so. Large-scale manufacturers face great uncertainty about the salability of their products. If they cannot make a profit, their capacity is unutilized (much of the capital stock is not easily transferable to other industries) and their employees are let go. The reduced incomes of the employees in turn reduce spending, so other businesses cannot sell their wares. Thus a miscalculation in a small part of the economy can cascade throughout the system. Further, economies of scale make it imperative to capture a large market, which leads to economic imperialism. In the transition to market domination by the largest producers, many sizeable manufacturers will be driven out of business, too.
If Henry Ford discovers a cheaper way to produce cars, the resulting bankruptcies of competitors carry with them enormous social costs, but these costs do not form any part of Ford’s profit-seeking decision calculus. During the transition to Ford’s market dominance, the full costs of supplying cars – which could include riots and repressive measures – increase. Capitalism is based on private profit, not on overall social wellbeing.
2. The Possibility of Leisure Surely productivity has reached the point that fine living standards could be achieved with four hours of work per day for healthy adults. But work and leisure are not evenly distributed, so some people work long hours, while others are unemployed. [This is covering ground that Russell explored in the titular essay of In Praise of Idleness; he acknowledges this connection in an initial footnote on page 98.] Despite the unemployment, average working hours now exceed four hours, indicating that some time is wasted or is utilized to produce goods beyond the necessities and “simple comforts [p. 99]” that comprise a reasonable living standard. The waste is prodigal: advertising and marketing, the excess capacity resulting from private enterprise, trade restrictions inspired by nationalism that prevent goods from being produced in the lowest-cost fashion or location. “Then there is the waste involved in armaments, and in military training, which involves the whole male population wherever there is compulsory military service [p. 100].” In our current economic organization, a reduction in such waste would have the paradoxical effect of worsening the lot of the working class. [Russell’s point provides a faint echo of Mandeville.]
3. Economic Insecurity Most people in today’s society have good reason to fear that they will become destitute -- if they are not already destitute. This pervading terror undermines happiness and stokes societal madness. The security that is at the root of most interest in wealth is unavailable, leading to a sort of recklessness in decisionmaking. “Economic security would do more to increase the happiness of civilised communities than any other change that can be imagined, except the prevention of war [p. 101].” People can be required to work if that is socially needed, but they should not be punished economically for an undersupply of jobs. Financial security with job retraining for those whose professions see reduced demand might mean that the pay of the highest earners is reduced, but it would be worth that cost. Few people work out of hope for an outsized economic windfall. [Russell noted in 1919 that most people would be happier working than by receiving the same wages without working.] Honor can be a significant motivator, and could be more socially useful if honors were distributed in ways that mirrored social benefits better than financial returns now do. The desire for success generally promotes the social good; the desire for huge wealth no more conduces to societal wellbeing than do other forms of gluttony.
4. The Unemployed Rich Many rich people are quite idle, and though they are unsophisticated, they and their bad taste often control the production of cultural goods. Art could do better under socialism than under this form of capitalism. [Russell devoted a chapter of his 1919 book Proposed Roads to Freedom to creative endeavor under socialism.] The idle rich also provide the customers for innumerable and unnecessary small shops, all selling the same items in a desultory exchange which is a waste of everyone’s time. All of the retainers catering to the perceived needs of the idle rich suffer moral and intellectual harm from their economic dependence upon foolish wealthy people.
5. Education Access to higher education is typically available only to the well-to-do, so much talent is wasted. State dominance in the education sphere assures that ideas that are not supportive of the status quo will be suppressed. [Shades here of Russell’s Education and the Good Life. ] It will require a socialist regime secure in its power to remedy these longstanding defects of the education system.
Chapter 7 is sufficiently long that following long-established RBR precedent, its summentary will be broken into two parts. This is part one…
Most current socialists are Marxists, and accept that a proletarian-based revolution is the only path to socialism. This dogma repels non-proletarian would-be sympathizers, and many non-proletarians think a preemptive strike against socialists might be better than waiting for their own defeat in the coming class war. Fascism draws some support in this fashion; more generally, the equating of socialism with Marxism makes it very hard for socialist ideas to make headway in the West.
Though I [Russell] am a fervent supporter of socialist ideas, for me, socialism is not fundamentally about class war or economic fairness. “I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race [p. 91].” The violence associated with a transition to socialism is not inherent to it, but is a byproduct of the attitudes of its intemperate supporters.
The definition of socialism includes state control of the commanding heights of the economy, as well as democratic control of the state. Marx and other early socialists would concur with these descriptions of socialism, but the Bolsheviks opted to limit political power to members of the party vanguard. Such a regime might be part of a transition to socialism, but a sustainable socialist system requires democracy to go along with social ownership of the economy. “Unless there is popular control, there can be no reason to expect the State to conduct its economic enterprises except for its own enrichment, and therefore exploitation will merely take a new form [p. 92].”
Some small-scale private enterprise, including construction and finance, is compatible with socialism. People can be personally wealthy, but they cannot be coupon clippers, as there will be no large publicly traded companies in which to invest, and such investments would be prohibited. Wealth disparities would be minimized when interest incomes are unavailable – but only disparities that do not confer power over other individuals would be permissible.
Socialism offers many advantages, but they probably would not be realizable if the socialism were achieved after a protracted, bitter, and militarized class war. The analysis here presupposes a largely peaceful transition to socialism. The path could be more peaceful if socialists would focus on the advantages of economic organization, as opposed to envy of the rich. Here are nine of the many arguments in support of socialism. [The numbering and the italicized titles of the pro-socialism arguments are copied directly from Russell, but I suppress quotation marks in this instance – RBR]:
1. The Breakdown of the Profit Motive The belief that the pursuit of profit would lead to proper decisions about what and how much to produce once was reasonable, but no longer is so. Large-scale manufacturers face great uncertainty about the salability of their products. If they cannot make a profit, their capacity is unutilized (much of the capital stock is not easily transferable to other industries) and their employees are let go. The reduced incomes of the employees in turn reduce spending, so other businesses cannot sell their wares. Thus a miscalculation in a small part of the economy can cascade throughout the system. Further, economies of scale make it imperative to capture a large market, which leads to economic imperialism. In the transition to market domination by the largest producers, many sizeable manufacturers will be driven out of business, too.
If Henry Ford discovers a cheaper way to produce cars, the resulting bankruptcies of competitors carry with them enormous social costs, but these costs do not form any part of Ford’s profit-seeking decision calculus. During the transition to Ford’s market dominance, the full costs of supplying cars – which could include riots and repressive measures – increase. Capitalism is based on private profit, not on overall social wellbeing.
2. The Possibility of Leisure Surely productivity has reached the point that fine living standards could be achieved with four hours of work per day for healthy adults. But work and leisure are not evenly distributed, so some people work long hours, while others are unemployed. [This is covering ground that Russell explored in the titular essay of In Praise of Idleness; he acknowledges this connection in an initial footnote on page 98.] Despite the unemployment, average working hours now exceed four hours, indicating that some time is wasted or is utilized to produce goods beyond the necessities and “simple comforts [p. 99]” that comprise a reasonable living standard. The waste is prodigal: advertising and marketing, the excess capacity resulting from private enterprise, trade restrictions inspired by nationalism that prevent goods from being produced in the lowest-cost fashion or location. “Then there is the waste involved in armaments, and in military training, which involves the whole male population wherever there is compulsory military service [p. 100].” In our current economic organization, a reduction in such waste would have the paradoxical effect of worsening the lot of the working class. [Russell’s point provides a faint echo of Mandeville.]
3. Economic Insecurity Most people in today’s society have good reason to fear that they will become destitute -- if they are not already destitute. This pervading terror undermines happiness and stokes societal madness. The security that is at the root of most interest in wealth is unavailable, leading to a sort of recklessness in decisionmaking. “Economic security would do more to increase the happiness of civilised communities than any other change that can be imagined, except the prevention of war [p. 101].” People can be required to work if that is socially needed, but they should not be punished economically for an undersupply of jobs. Financial security with job retraining for those whose professions see reduced demand might mean that the pay of the highest earners is reduced, but it would be worth that cost. Few people work out of hope for an outsized economic windfall. [Russell noted in 1919 that most people would be happier working than by receiving the same wages without working.] Honor can be a significant motivator, and could be more socially useful if honors were distributed in ways that mirrored social benefits better than financial returns now do. The desire for success generally promotes the social good; the desire for huge wealth no more conduces to societal wellbeing than do other forms of gluttony.
4. The Unemployed Rich Many rich people are quite idle, and though they are unsophisticated, they and their bad taste often control the production of cultural goods. Art could do better under socialism than under this form of capitalism. [Russell devoted a chapter of his 1919 book Proposed Roads to Freedom to creative endeavor under socialism.] The idle rich also provide the customers for innumerable and unnecessary small shops, all selling the same items in a desultory exchange which is a waste of everyone’s time. All of the retainers catering to the perceived needs of the idle rich suffer moral and intellectual harm from their economic dependence upon foolish wealthy people.
5. Education Access to higher education is typically available only to the well-to-do, so much talent is wasted. State dominance in the education sphere assures that ideas that are not supportive of the status quo will be suppressed. [Shades here of Russell’s Education and the Good Life. ] It will require a socialist regime secure in its power to remedy these longstanding defects of the education system.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
In Praise of Idleness, Chapter Six
“Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism,” pages 82-90
I [Russell] do not subscribe to the notion that one must, in effect, be a supporter of communism or a supporter of fascism: I am opposed to both.
First, I’ll provide eight reasons for not supporting Third International-style communism. (1) I see no reason to be convinced by either Marx’s or Lenin’s philosophy. History lacks a dialectical determinant, contra Marx and Hegel. (2) Marx’s economics is a hodgepodge designed to make classical political economy support Marxian politics. (3) A scientific outlook precludes regarding any thinker as infallible or any text as sacred. (4) The undemocratic nature of communism assures a tyranny by the powerful – in this case, the all-powerful state. Marx recognizes the potential for tyranny by all forms of government except communism. (5) The joining of political to economic control under communism would stifle individual liberty. Unpopular ideas, which are the source of progress, would be squelched by communist bureaucrats. (6) Marxism divides the world along class lines, being antagonistic to white-collar workers while glorifying manual workers. (7) The focus on the class war is likely to lead to a real war, with catastrophic consequences. Friends of socialism should aim for gradual persuasion, not military conquest. (8) Hate is a major driving force of Marxism and communism, and it will result in severe oppression by Marxists in power. [Russell’s critique of Marx and communism in In Praise of Idleness echoes many other Russellian writings on this theme.]
I [Russell] share many of the ends of communism, but oppose the means; for fascism, I object to both the means and the end. Though there are various strains of fascism, and more are evolving, they share some central elements. Fascism “is anti-democratic, it is nationalistic, it is capitalistic, and it appeals to those sections of the middle class which suffer through modern developments and expect to suffer still more if Socialism or Communism becomes established [p. 85].” (The theoretical version of communism also is anti-democratic, but only temporarily, and aims to promote the wellbeing of wage earners, a label which eventually is intended to include everyone.) Fascism is not interested in the general welfare; rather, it concentrates on favored groups which are deemed to be superior. The unfavored will be forced into serfdom, serving their masters. It can be hoped that fascism will provide a well-organized prison for the non-elect, but that is the extent of rational expectation. The economic planning that fascism took from the socialists is aimed to improve the welfare only of the favored folks – which in Germany and Italy, are the already dominant economic classes.
The focus on an elect within Fascist ideology is a throwback to a pre-Christian, pre-democratic era, when not all people were created equal, and the purpose of the unwashed was to promote the grandeur of the special classes.
Fascism in power would exacerbate the worst features of capitalism. The lower classes would barely receive subsistence wages, and effectively would be slaves. This is the outcome under dictatorship (as in Russia) or under a capitalism unconstrained by democracy. But fascism in power is a short-run phenomenon, as the focus on heavy industry turns into a prelude to war. The war will be highly destructive, and fascism will be one of its casualties.
Fascism cannot be said to represent a coherent body of thought. Its appeal is to the emotions of small shopkeepers and others whose interests in the modern world are under threat, as well as to the hunger for power of some wealthy industrialists. Its irrationality lies in its inability to actually serve the long-term interests of those whom it aims to help, though it does provide some short-term psychological comfort.
Ensconced traditions of representative government offer Britain and the US some inoculation against fascism; France perhaps is more at risk, especially under wartime conditions.
Commonalities in communism and fascism admit for common, and telling, objections. Both isms involve a small group of people trying to shape the whole population into a preconceived plan, to be cogs in the machine that the creators find so enticing. [Shades here of Adam Smith’s “man of system” treating humans as if they were chess pieces fit to be moved at the player’s behest, without regard to the humans’ own preferences – RBR.] People who do not readily enough fit the plan are disposed of. Such policies are both unethical, and, in the long run, unsuccessful.
As with plants, humans can be sheared into topiary-type designs – but the human subjects are not as passive as the plants. [Here Russell echoes his godfather John Stuart Mill.] One type of action for the trimmed man might be to learn the trade of the shearer, and to take up the shears himself, for those lower in the hierarchy. Pruning leads to such cruelty when it does not lead to listlessness. “And from a population with these characteristics no good thing is to be expected [p. 89].” [Compare with Mill’s On Liberty, just at the end: “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.” Reading Bertrand Russell has found occasion to cite this passage in the past.]
The dictatorial powers at the disposal of a fascist or communist state, combined with the theoretical necessity to suppress the subordinate elements of society, imply that a cruel tyrant will hold the reins. Someone with a humanitarian outlook will not survive the competition for control, or will have to forcibly override his own gentler inclinations. Any good intentions that may have accompanied the original path to power will eventually be lost, replaced with the need to maintain power.
The appeal of machinery makes it easy to view society in mechanical terms, with parts, not people, and where the controllers have a sort of omnipotent status. But unlike machines, humans themselves alter under treatment, whether they are the controlled or the controlling. The resulting uncertainty about the long-term effects of manipulation makes it unwise to invest control in a dictator. “The ultimate psychological argument for democracy and for patience is that an element of free growth, of go as you please and untrained natural living, is essential if men are not to become misshapen monsters [p. 90].” Fascism and communism are not the only choices, and certainly not desirable choices, as democracy remains a viable and preferred alternative. It is only the belief that fascism and communism exhaust the options that could make it so.
I [Russell] do not subscribe to the notion that one must, in effect, be a supporter of communism or a supporter of fascism: I am opposed to both.
First, I’ll provide eight reasons for not supporting Third International-style communism. (1) I see no reason to be convinced by either Marx’s or Lenin’s philosophy. History lacks a dialectical determinant, contra Marx and Hegel. (2) Marx’s economics is a hodgepodge designed to make classical political economy support Marxian politics. (3) A scientific outlook precludes regarding any thinker as infallible or any text as sacred. (4) The undemocratic nature of communism assures a tyranny by the powerful – in this case, the all-powerful state. Marx recognizes the potential for tyranny by all forms of government except communism. (5) The joining of political to economic control under communism would stifle individual liberty. Unpopular ideas, which are the source of progress, would be squelched by communist bureaucrats. (6) Marxism divides the world along class lines, being antagonistic to white-collar workers while glorifying manual workers. (7) The focus on the class war is likely to lead to a real war, with catastrophic consequences. Friends of socialism should aim for gradual persuasion, not military conquest. (8) Hate is a major driving force of Marxism and communism, and it will result in severe oppression by Marxists in power. [Russell’s critique of Marx and communism in In Praise of Idleness echoes many other Russellian writings on this theme.]
I [Russell] share many of the ends of communism, but oppose the means; for fascism, I object to both the means and the end. Though there are various strains of fascism, and more are evolving, they share some central elements. Fascism “is anti-democratic, it is nationalistic, it is capitalistic, and it appeals to those sections of the middle class which suffer through modern developments and expect to suffer still more if Socialism or Communism becomes established [p. 85].” (The theoretical version of communism also is anti-democratic, but only temporarily, and aims to promote the wellbeing of wage earners, a label which eventually is intended to include everyone.) Fascism is not interested in the general welfare; rather, it concentrates on favored groups which are deemed to be superior. The unfavored will be forced into serfdom, serving their masters. It can be hoped that fascism will provide a well-organized prison for the non-elect, but that is the extent of rational expectation. The economic planning that fascism took from the socialists is aimed to improve the welfare only of the favored folks – which in Germany and Italy, are the already dominant economic classes.
The focus on an elect within Fascist ideology is a throwback to a pre-Christian, pre-democratic era, when not all people were created equal, and the purpose of the unwashed was to promote the grandeur of the special classes.
Fascism in power would exacerbate the worst features of capitalism. The lower classes would barely receive subsistence wages, and effectively would be slaves. This is the outcome under dictatorship (as in Russia) or under a capitalism unconstrained by democracy. But fascism in power is a short-run phenomenon, as the focus on heavy industry turns into a prelude to war. The war will be highly destructive, and fascism will be one of its casualties.
Fascism cannot be said to represent a coherent body of thought. Its appeal is to the emotions of small shopkeepers and others whose interests in the modern world are under threat, as well as to the hunger for power of some wealthy industrialists. Its irrationality lies in its inability to actually serve the long-term interests of those whom it aims to help, though it does provide some short-term psychological comfort.
Ensconced traditions of representative government offer Britain and the US some inoculation against fascism; France perhaps is more at risk, especially under wartime conditions.
Commonalities in communism and fascism admit for common, and telling, objections. Both isms involve a small group of people trying to shape the whole population into a preconceived plan, to be cogs in the machine that the creators find so enticing. [Shades here of Adam Smith’s “man of system” treating humans as if they were chess pieces fit to be moved at the player’s behest, without regard to the humans’ own preferences – RBR.] People who do not readily enough fit the plan are disposed of. Such policies are both unethical, and, in the long run, unsuccessful.
As with plants, humans can be sheared into topiary-type designs – but the human subjects are not as passive as the plants. [Here Russell echoes his godfather John Stuart Mill.] One type of action for the trimmed man might be to learn the trade of the shearer, and to take up the shears himself, for those lower in the hierarchy. Pruning leads to such cruelty when it does not lead to listlessness. “And from a population with these characteristics no good thing is to be expected [p. 89].” [Compare with Mill’s On Liberty, just at the end: “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.” Reading Bertrand Russell has found occasion to cite this passage in the past.]
The dictatorial powers at the disposal of a fascist or communist state, combined with the theoretical necessity to suppress the subordinate elements of society, imply that a cruel tyrant will hold the reins. Someone with a humanitarian outlook will not survive the competition for control, or will have to forcibly override his own gentler inclinations. Any good intentions that may have accompanied the original path to power will eventually be lost, replaced with the need to maintain power.
The appeal of machinery makes it easy to view society in mechanical terms, with parts, not people, and where the controllers have a sort of omnipotent status. But unlike machines, humans themselves alter under treatment, whether they are the controlled or the controlling. The resulting uncertainty about the long-term effects of manipulation makes it unwise to invest control in a dictator. “The ultimate psychological argument for democracy and for patience is that an element of free growth, of go as you please and untrained natural living, is essential if men are not to become misshapen monsters [p. 90].” Fascism and communism are not the only choices, and certainly not desirable choices, as democracy remains a viable and preferred alternative. It is only the belief that fascism and communism exhaust the options that could make it so.
Friday, November 7, 2014
In Praise of Idleness, Chapter Five
“The Ancestry of Fascism,” pages 63-81
The dominant tenor of a country is influenced by political ideas of an earlier era; Soviet Russia, for instance, draws upon The Communist Manifesto of 1848. But for the ideas to be applied, they must meet a conducive environment, one prepared by economic and political events.
Newton’s revolution in the sciences brought hope that a similar deductive approach – often forgotten is the century of data collection that preceded Newton – could solve social and political problems. This hyper-rationalism reached its zenith with the Rights of Man doctrine popular at the time of the American and French revolutions. But by then, Hume had already laid the groundwork for undermining the deductive, ratiocinative method. Hume employed induction and empirical observation, while recognizing that induction could scarcely be scientific – and hence that science itself had unfirm foundations, rendering it as irrational as theology.
Nonetheless, Hume’s skeptical view towards science was for mental, not practical, consumption. For making our way in this world, science is our best bet.
Neither the continental nor the British followers of Hume were prepared to accept his agnosticism. “European thought has never recovered its previous wholeheartedness; among all the successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has meant some degree of madness [p. 65].”
Kant was driven to believe in things like God and causality which was not made easy in the shadow of Hume. So Kant resorted to inventing a distinction between pure and practical reason, where the lion’s share of living fell into the practical camp. But practical reason was just a blind for Kant’s own prejudices, not any logical truths. [Kant never seems to come off too well in Russell’s recounting.]
With no successful refutation of Hume in sight, we must admit that there is no clear demarcation between what constitutes reason and what constitutes unreason. But the embrace of reason tends to involve three features: a reliance upon persuasion and not force; a sincere presentation of arguments, an avoidance of disingenuousness; an eschewal of intuition when data and deduction are available. The Inquisition, political propaganda, and an appeal to the will of the gods are anti-reason, then.
Basing your arguments upon reason is an approach that generally assumes that you and your audience have shared interests. Despite the example of Mrs. Bond, you do not reason with those you intend to ingest. When the political class consisted of a small number of aristocrats, they could reason among their more-or-less equal selves. Diffusion of political power implies fewer shared starting points, and hence less matter for reason to work upon. The result is appeals to intuition; but intuitions differ, and conflict is likely.
The history of the world is replete with revolts against reason and the adoption of superstitions – as well as revolutions in the pro-reason direction. There is always an uneasy balance between the forces of reason and unreason; unreason has been growing since the 1860s. The new wave of unreason is distinguished from those of earlier epochs in that power, not salvation, is its aim. The camp of unreason can claim Carlyle and Nietzsche and Kipling; so far, Hitler is the culmination. In the opposite camp are socialists and utilitarians: “both are cosmopolitan, both are democratic, both appeal to economic self-interest [p. 68].”
Nietzsche provides a good account of what the fascists hope to achieve – a goal that rejects Bentham both with respect to happiness and with respect to being inclusive. [Bentham would have included all sentient beings in aggregating happiness or freedom from suffering – RBR.] That goal is to produce exceptional individuals, at the cost of the sacrifice of most of mankind. Goals, whether Nietzsche’s revolting one or more pleasant alternatives, cannot be said to be irrational: rationality involves matching means to given ends. Nonetheless, goals such as Nietzsche’s are closely connected to irrationality, as they all but imply a lack of impartiality. A goal that focuses on the creation and burnishing of great men is adopted by those who believe that they are great men.
The ideological parents of fascism share certain characteristics. In particular, will, power, and force take pride of place, as opposed to reason and happiness. A Spartan asceticism is advocated, with the goal of dominating others, not of building inner virtue. The proto-fascists adopt social Darwinism, where the units of struggle are races, not individuals, and where the winners are viewed as superior.
“Fichte has received less than his due share of credit for inaugurating this great movement [p. 70].” Fichte starts with the reflexive relation “I am I,” and decides that this declaration is an act of self creation; already, will is central to the story. Later, he declares that Germans are superior, based on the purity of their language. For Germans to maintain their purity, they must employ education to corral the freedom of the individual will. Germans should be economically self-sufficient, and universal military service should be mandatory, with patriotism, not defense, as the aim. Noble people will embrace such a self-sacrifice, and the ignoble must sacrifice, too – they do not count in themselves, and only are serfs meant to serve the noble. Democracy, which is the political twin of Bentham’s utilitarianism (and of Christianity, wherein every human being contains a soul), has no place in Fichte’s worldview.
So Fichte, like Marx’s communism, designates an elect, and those who adopt such views believe that they are the elect. But who are Fichte’s nobles? “There is no objective criterion of ‘nobility’ except success in war; therefore war is the necessary outcome of this creed [p. 72].”
Carlyle drew upon Fiche but added a sort of socialism that itself was not based so much on love for the proletariat as it was on a dislike of industrialization and newly-wealthy industrialists. Actual socialists are still sometimes taken in by Carlyle and his paeans to heroism, though those whom he views as heroic generally are brutal ruffians. There is little in Carlyle that would be objectionable to Nazis.
Mazzini, alternatively, identified the nation, not the individual, as the unit of heroism, and ranked Italy highest. But he shared with Carlyle the idea that duty is more important than individual or collective happiness. Democratic majorities have no moral significance, while people possess ingrained, intuitive, and correct notions of morality. But people have differing views on morality, so what Mazzini was proclaiming in practice was the superiority of his own moral views over the general will of the people.
The most recent addition to the intellectual underpinnings of fascism is racism, where certain races are declared to be superior for faux-Darwinian reasons. (Nietzsche supported breeding super-men, but their superiority did not lie in their race or nationality.) “About race, if politics were not involved it would be enough to say that nothing politically important is known [p. 74].” As far as we can tell, environment trumps genetics. We have no rational reasons for judging one race or nationality as superior to another. “The whole movement, from Fichte onwards, is a method of bolstering up self-esteem and lust for power by means of beliefs which have nothing in their favour except that they are flattering [p. 75].” Men become lunatics when their self-esteem is annihilated, so those who impose the annihilation shouldn’t be surprised when lunacy follows.
The seeds of anti-rationality ideologies abound, but only occasionally do they fall on fertile ground. The major strands of anti-rationalism – the emphasis on will and power, and the acceptance of intuitively-held propositions that could not withstand scientific scrutiny – hold appeal to industrially-oriented minds and to those whose loss of power is befuddling. War and industrialization, therefore, have prepared the ground for fascism. The large numbers of dispossessed (that is, those dispossessed of their former privileges) are used by the militarists and industrialists to adopt an ideology that embraces modern industry and war, but looks backwards in other matters.
The adoption of a fascist ideology by the industrialists is rational, in that such an ideology, in power, could well serve their interests; the dispossessed will not recover their lost glories, however, so that their embrace of fascism is irrational. Emotion overcomes the reason of the dispossessed, and the fascist leaders dole out irrational claims that feed this emotion. The militarists’ gain will involve untold human suffering, so while rational, it is deeply immoral.
The leading German industrialist Fritz Thyssen supports the Nazis because he thinks, incorrectly, that his economic interests will be served by Nazi policies, and socialism will be eradicated. “It is necessary for him to stir up German self-confidence and nationalist feeling to a dangerous degree, and unsuccessful war is the most probable outcome [p. 77].” [Recall that In Praise of Idleness was published in 1935.] The Germans might have early success in a military confrontation, but they won’t prevail in the long run: the Germans are repeating their mistake from the Great War, that of ignoring America.
Protestantism (with its rebellious spirit) might seem to be an ally of the Nazi movement. Certainly the proto-fascist thinkers, including Fichte, Carlyle, and Mazzini, had Calvinist or Lutheran leanings. But Protestantism shares many elements with Catholicism, and along these dimensions, Protestants cannot easily be reconciled to the Nazis. Perhaps organized Christianity can keep the Nazi menace at bay.
Christianity involves an ingrained respect for truth that is anathema to the Nazis. Galileo was persecuted on the grounds that his ideas were false; the Nazis reject relativity because its discoverer is Jewish, and truth is not even part of the argument. When objective truth leaves the field, the question of what to believe will be answered by might, not right.
Another force that promotes unreason is that many people of ability lack an alternative outlet for their love of power. Suburbs offer little in the way of public life. Suburb dwellers who commute to their white-collar work in a great metropolis have no role in governing, while at work, they take orders from their bosses. They would be prone towards socialist doctrines if snobbery did not keep them from associating with the working classes. An active spirit in these conditions would find fascism to offer a hopeful alternative.
Anti-reason, therefore, grows in politics on both the demand and the supply side. The demand comes from people whose current circumstances do not offer sufficient prospects, but they are unwilling to connect to a socialist movement that puts the working class in the vanguard. The supply comes from intelligent, wealthy men whose own interests are served by swelling certain types of hysteria. “Anti-Communism, fear of foreign armaments, and hatred of foreign competition, are the most important bogeys [p. 80].” These notions are not irrational per se, but they are used to hinder intelligent discussion of practical affairs.
Socialism and peace are what the world needs, but these do not conduce to the wellbeing of the powerful. Movements towards socialism and peace can be made to appear detrimental to large classes of society, and this appearance can be fostered by fomenting hysteria. Economic hardship eases the job of the merchants of unreason.
The rise of nationalism and class tension brings a plethora of “truths,” those of the English and those of the French, those of the wage earners and those of the capitalists. With the turn to unreason, these competing truths cannot encounter each other in rational discourse, leaving ongoing strife and war as the available fora. Reason appeals to universal standards, whereas unreason draws from private passions. Cooperative agreements are harder to come by when reason is swept away. Reason always is needed for human flourishing. The need is strongest when an impersonal rationality is “despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree [p. 81].”
The dominant tenor of a country is influenced by political ideas of an earlier era; Soviet Russia, for instance, draws upon The Communist Manifesto of 1848. But for the ideas to be applied, they must meet a conducive environment, one prepared by economic and political events.
Newton’s revolution in the sciences brought hope that a similar deductive approach – often forgotten is the century of data collection that preceded Newton – could solve social and political problems. This hyper-rationalism reached its zenith with the Rights of Man doctrine popular at the time of the American and French revolutions. But by then, Hume had already laid the groundwork for undermining the deductive, ratiocinative method. Hume employed induction and empirical observation, while recognizing that induction could scarcely be scientific – and hence that science itself had unfirm foundations, rendering it as irrational as theology.
Nonetheless, Hume’s skeptical view towards science was for mental, not practical, consumption. For making our way in this world, science is our best bet.
Neither the continental nor the British followers of Hume were prepared to accept his agnosticism. “European thought has never recovered its previous wholeheartedness; among all the successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has meant some degree of madness [p. 65].”
Kant was driven to believe in things like God and causality which was not made easy in the shadow of Hume. So Kant resorted to inventing a distinction between pure and practical reason, where the lion’s share of living fell into the practical camp. But practical reason was just a blind for Kant’s own prejudices, not any logical truths. [Kant never seems to come off too well in Russell’s recounting.]
With no successful refutation of Hume in sight, we must admit that there is no clear demarcation between what constitutes reason and what constitutes unreason. But the embrace of reason tends to involve three features: a reliance upon persuasion and not force; a sincere presentation of arguments, an avoidance of disingenuousness; an eschewal of intuition when data and deduction are available. The Inquisition, political propaganda, and an appeal to the will of the gods are anti-reason, then.
Basing your arguments upon reason is an approach that generally assumes that you and your audience have shared interests. Despite the example of Mrs. Bond, you do not reason with those you intend to ingest. When the political class consisted of a small number of aristocrats, they could reason among their more-or-less equal selves. Diffusion of political power implies fewer shared starting points, and hence less matter for reason to work upon. The result is appeals to intuition; but intuitions differ, and conflict is likely.
The history of the world is replete with revolts against reason and the adoption of superstitions – as well as revolutions in the pro-reason direction. There is always an uneasy balance between the forces of reason and unreason; unreason has been growing since the 1860s. The new wave of unreason is distinguished from those of earlier epochs in that power, not salvation, is its aim. The camp of unreason can claim Carlyle and Nietzsche and Kipling; so far, Hitler is the culmination. In the opposite camp are socialists and utilitarians: “both are cosmopolitan, both are democratic, both appeal to economic self-interest [p. 68].”
Nietzsche provides a good account of what the fascists hope to achieve – a goal that rejects Bentham both with respect to happiness and with respect to being inclusive. [Bentham would have included all sentient beings in aggregating happiness or freedom from suffering – RBR.] That goal is to produce exceptional individuals, at the cost of the sacrifice of most of mankind. Goals, whether Nietzsche’s revolting one or more pleasant alternatives, cannot be said to be irrational: rationality involves matching means to given ends. Nonetheless, goals such as Nietzsche’s are closely connected to irrationality, as they all but imply a lack of impartiality. A goal that focuses on the creation and burnishing of great men is adopted by those who believe that they are great men.
The ideological parents of fascism share certain characteristics. In particular, will, power, and force take pride of place, as opposed to reason and happiness. A Spartan asceticism is advocated, with the goal of dominating others, not of building inner virtue. The proto-fascists adopt social Darwinism, where the units of struggle are races, not individuals, and where the winners are viewed as superior.
“Fichte has received less than his due share of credit for inaugurating this great movement [p. 70].” Fichte starts with the reflexive relation “I am I,” and decides that this declaration is an act of self creation; already, will is central to the story. Later, he declares that Germans are superior, based on the purity of their language. For Germans to maintain their purity, they must employ education to corral the freedom of the individual will. Germans should be economically self-sufficient, and universal military service should be mandatory, with patriotism, not defense, as the aim. Noble people will embrace such a self-sacrifice, and the ignoble must sacrifice, too – they do not count in themselves, and only are serfs meant to serve the noble. Democracy, which is the political twin of Bentham’s utilitarianism (and of Christianity, wherein every human being contains a soul), has no place in Fichte’s worldview.
So Fichte, like Marx’s communism, designates an elect, and those who adopt such views believe that they are the elect. But who are Fichte’s nobles? “There is no objective criterion of ‘nobility’ except success in war; therefore war is the necessary outcome of this creed [p. 72].”
Carlyle drew upon Fiche but added a sort of socialism that itself was not based so much on love for the proletariat as it was on a dislike of industrialization and newly-wealthy industrialists. Actual socialists are still sometimes taken in by Carlyle and his paeans to heroism, though those whom he views as heroic generally are brutal ruffians. There is little in Carlyle that would be objectionable to Nazis.
Mazzini, alternatively, identified the nation, not the individual, as the unit of heroism, and ranked Italy highest. But he shared with Carlyle the idea that duty is more important than individual or collective happiness. Democratic majorities have no moral significance, while people possess ingrained, intuitive, and correct notions of morality. But people have differing views on morality, so what Mazzini was proclaiming in practice was the superiority of his own moral views over the general will of the people.
The most recent addition to the intellectual underpinnings of fascism is racism, where certain races are declared to be superior for faux-Darwinian reasons. (Nietzsche supported breeding super-men, but their superiority did not lie in their race or nationality.) “About race, if politics were not involved it would be enough to say that nothing politically important is known [p. 74].” As far as we can tell, environment trumps genetics. We have no rational reasons for judging one race or nationality as superior to another. “The whole movement, from Fichte onwards, is a method of bolstering up self-esteem and lust for power by means of beliefs which have nothing in their favour except that they are flattering [p. 75].” Men become lunatics when their self-esteem is annihilated, so those who impose the annihilation shouldn’t be surprised when lunacy follows.
The seeds of anti-rationality ideologies abound, but only occasionally do they fall on fertile ground. The major strands of anti-rationalism – the emphasis on will and power, and the acceptance of intuitively-held propositions that could not withstand scientific scrutiny – hold appeal to industrially-oriented minds and to those whose loss of power is befuddling. War and industrialization, therefore, have prepared the ground for fascism. The large numbers of dispossessed (that is, those dispossessed of their former privileges) are used by the militarists and industrialists to adopt an ideology that embraces modern industry and war, but looks backwards in other matters.
The adoption of a fascist ideology by the industrialists is rational, in that such an ideology, in power, could well serve their interests; the dispossessed will not recover their lost glories, however, so that their embrace of fascism is irrational. Emotion overcomes the reason of the dispossessed, and the fascist leaders dole out irrational claims that feed this emotion. The militarists’ gain will involve untold human suffering, so while rational, it is deeply immoral.
The leading German industrialist Fritz Thyssen supports the Nazis because he thinks, incorrectly, that his economic interests will be served by Nazi policies, and socialism will be eradicated. “It is necessary for him to stir up German self-confidence and nationalist feeling to a dangerous degree, and unsuccessful war is the most probable outcome [p. 77].” [Recall that In Praise of Idleness was published in 1935.] The Germans might have early success in a military confrontation, but they won’t prevail in the long run: the Germans are repeating their mistake from the Great War, that of ignoring America.
Protestantism (with its rebellious spirit) might seem to be an ally of the Nazi movement. Certainly the proto-fascist thinkers, including Fichte, Carlyle, and Mazzini, had Calvinist or Lutheran leanings. But Protestantism shares many elements with Catholicism, and along these dimensions, Protestants cannot easily be reconciled to the Nazis. Perhaps organized Christianity can keep the Nazi menace at bay.
Christianity involves an ingrained respect for truth that is anathema to the Nazis. Galileo was persecuted on the grounds that his ideas were false; the Nazis reject relativity because its discoverer is Jewish, and truth is not even part of the argument. When objective truth leaves the field, the question of what to believe will be answered by might, not right.
Another force that promotes unreason is that many people of ability lack an alternative outlet for their love of power. Suburbs offer little in the way of public life. Suburb dwellers who commute to their white-collar work in a great metropolis have no role in governing, while at work, they take orders from their bosses. They would be prone towards socialist doctrines if snobbery did not keep them from associating with the working classes. An active spirit in these conditions would find fascism to offer a hopeful alternative.
Anti-reason, therefore, grows in politics on both the demand and the supply side. The demand comes from people whose current circumstances do not offer sufficient prospects, but they are unwilling to connect to a socialist movement that puts the working class in the vanguard. The supply comes from intelligent, wealthy men whose own interests are served by swelling certain types of hysteria. “Anti-Communism, fear of foreign armaments, and hatred of foreign competition, are the most important bogeys [p. 80].” These notions are not irrational per se, but they are used to hinder intelligent discussion of practical affairs.
Socialism and peace are what the world needs, but these do not conduce to the wellbeing of the powerful. Movements towards socialism and peace can be made to appear detrimental to large classes of society, and this appearance can be fostered by fomenting hysteria. Economic hardship eases the job of the merchants of unreason.
The rise of nationalism and class tension brings a plethora of “truths,” those of the English and those of the French, those of the wage earners and those of the capitalists. With the turn to unreason, these competing truths cannot encounter each other in rational discourse, leaving ongoing strife and war as the available fora. Reason appeals to universal standards, whereas unreason draws from private passions. Cooperative agreements are harder to come by when reason is swept away. Reason always is needed for human flourishing. The need is strongest when an impersonal rationality is “despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree [p. 81].”
Thursday, September 4, 2014
In Praise of Idleness, Chapter Four
“The Modern Midas,” pages 49-62
[A footnote attached to the title of this chapter notes that the essay dates from 1932; In Praise of Idleness was published in 1935.]
Russell opens Chapter Four by recounting the King Midas tale, referencing (as he did in Education and the Good Life) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. The world is slow to digest (hard food for Midas!) the moral of the story. The Spanish hoarded Peruvian gold, raising prices but not increasing their consumption – though perhaps the increase in nominal incomes gave Spaniards a psychological boost through money illusion. The eastern seaboard of North America, left to the secondary powers of Holland and England, was less prized because of its lack of gold, but proved to be much more valuable.
Though we can see the folly of thinking of gold as real wealth when we examine historical examples, the deception continues to trip up governments: look at the indemnity imposed upon a defeated Germany in the wake of the Great War. The German reparations had to be paid in goods, but this implied that Germany was required to maintain what is considered to be a favorable balance of trade with the Allies; that is, the Allies were doing what their economic thinking took to be a favor for redeveloping Germany. Further, domestic producers in the Allied nations did not welcome competition from those German repayments-in-kind. The Allied view was that Germany had to pay, but any particular method of payment was unacceptable to the Allies. [Later, on pages 52-53, Russell presents a single-individual, Robinson Crusoe version of the Allies’ behavior, to sharpen its absurdity.]
“To this lunatic situation a lunatic solution was found [p. 51].” The Allies lent Germany the money to pay the reparations. No domestic industries were directly hurt, and the notion that Germany was being punished for its transgressions was maintained. The cycle was extended when Germany was loaned funds with which to make the interest payments on its earlier loans. When the limits to these sorts of machinations were reached, bankruptcies spread throughout the system, and the global depression, which had many other stimulants, ensued.
The Allies first took the viewpoint of consumers when they pressed for German reparations, but then they realized that Allied producers might not be so enthralled with the whole idea. Their shift in roles resulted in the crazy pay-only-in-a-useless-fashion compromise, one that would be seen as evidence of insanity in an individual, but is taken to be wisdom when pursued at the national level. Robinson Crusoe would welcome the option to specialize in the production of some goods and to trade for others – his living standards will be low if he must make himself everything that he consumes. But somehow nations feel they need to have domestic capacity in all industries. A rational plan for production, one that included retraining for workers departing from declining industries, would avoid this costly devotion to autarky – but such rationality is “contrary to business orthodoxy [p. 53].”
The mythologies connected to gold are surprisingly common. French enmity for Britain forced the British off of the gold standard, which was the proper economic policy, but one that was widely viewed as shameful in Britain. The whole “dig up gold in one place so it can be stored underground elsewhere” industry is quite absurd. [Russell reiterates this observation in Unpopular Essays.] “Nevertheless it is still supposed that, by some hocus-pocus, everybody’s financial stability depends upon a hoard of gold in the central bank of his country [p. 55].” Sometimes the gold can be in one country’s vault, but designated as being owned by another country. It would be simpler just to pretend that the gold had been mined without disturbing it from its original resting place. [Echoes here of "The Island of Stone Money."]
The notion that a gold standard commits governments to prudent monetary policy is misplaced; in a pinch, a government will adjust or suspend the standard, and override the commitment. All the warring parties in Europe depreciated their currencies post-conflict and hence diminished the real value of their debt, sometimes to the point of hyper-inflation making debt payments worthless. The Russians were forthright about debt repudiation, while the depreciating or inflating nations paid lip service to propriety. Countries, like people, repay debts when and only when it serves their interests. Domestic debt is particularly susceptible to strategic governmental behavior, as the nominal value of the domestic currency can be manipulated by the state. Repudiation of international debt is held in check, imperfectly, by the threat of hostile reactions from the debtor nations.
Ownership of property is generally due to military might. Look at how New York changed hands between Native Americans, the Dutch, the English, and the Americans. Natural resources discovered in poor countries have a tendency to fall under the control of powerful nations, with arms either directly or tacitly involved. Similarly, powerful nations, if they are debtors, can get away with not repaying. The only path to currency stability is not a tenuous gold standard, but a world government with military capabilities. Such a global state could provide stable money by guaranteeing the price of a standard commodity bundle, and would have a direct interest to do so. [I believe that Russell’s belief in the stability of such a currency is misplaced; see this paper by Paul Krugman -- RBR.] The fact that business people do not support a single central bank and a world currency is evidence that they are willing to trade their own prosperity in exchange for keeping foreigners poor.
Our psychological responses to buying and selling seem to ignore the fact that we cannot directly consume money, and that it is consumption, not production, that is the ultimate goal. “In almost every transaction, the seller is more pleased than the buyer [p. 58].” The psychic superiority of selling comes from our love of power, which for many, but by no means all people, exceeds our desire for pleasure. Those who do desire power more than pleasure, however, set the tone in our competitive times. Governments inherit these skewed ideas from the movers and shakers, with the nonsensical result that all countries desire to sell but not to buy.
Sellers care about consumers and competitors. But consumers are numerous, while competitors are few and known, so producers end up focused on their competitors, who, after all, are a source of harm. When those competitors are foreign, the focus is, if anything, more intense. Other countries are viewed more as economic foes than as potential customers, lending a stimulus to the imposition of tariffs. Countries are like a butcher in a small town, whose enmity for the other butchers in town is so outsized that he embarks on a successful mission to turn the entire town into vegetarians – and ruins himself along with the targets of his wrath. Hatred of foreigners similarly renders countries unable to see that those foreigners who sell to them also, directly or indirectly, are their customers.
In Britain, the longstanding conflict between the rich and the poor has shrouded the fact that rich bankers have interests that also are opposed to the interests of rich industrialists. The political success of the financial sector in the banks v. manufacturers rivalry almost ruined the country.
The divergence between the interest of the finance sector with that of society is a more general phenomenon. [Russell noted this disconnect in 1919 in Proposed Roads to Freedom.] Running a country to promote the interests of financiers is like running a museum to benefit the curator, who might profit most by selling off the holdings. The profit motive, in many instances, serves society’s interests, but the profit motive within the financial sector now does not do so, even if it has done so in the past. Regulation is needed to ensure that finance serves the interest of industry – which generally is more closely aligned with the public interest – instead of serving its own, parochial desires.
Superstitions are used by the powerful few to control the subordinate many. In the past, superstitions have been promulgated to aid the power of priests and kings. Now, the superstitions surrounding gold protect the rule of the financiers. Ordinary people are dazzled by the jargon, and associate larger gold reserves with more security. The subservience to financiers is protected by more than just the gold standard, however. They are wealthy, and wealthy people are in a position to influence academic and public opinion, and serve as natural leaders for those who fear communism. The superstitions concerning gold might be crucial to the insulation of the financial sector from normal democratic scrutiny.
Economics is of fundamental importance, but schoolchildren are not taught economics, and even most college students do not study it. Those who do usually receive the finance-biased, fanciful version which leads to support for the status quo: “superstition and mystery are useful to the holders of financial power [p. 62].”
Proficiency in finance is unfortunately akin to proficiency in arms, in that those who possess such expertise tend to have views that are not consonant with the public interest. They are obstacles to progress, not consciously, but because their profession biases their judgment. Broader and improved economics and social science education can help to counter the influence of these biases. Presumably such an educational reform would be welcomed by any friend of democracy, though such friends now appear to be rather scarce.
[A footnote attached to the title of this chapter notes that the essay dates from 1932; In Praise of Idleness was published in 1935.]
Russell opens Chapter Four by recounting the King Midas tale, referencing (as he did in Education and the Good Life) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. The world is slow to digest (hard food for Midas!) the moral of the story. The Spanish hoarded Peruvian gold, raising prices but not increasing their consumption – though perhaps the increase in nominal incomes gave Spaniards a psychological boost through money illusion. The eastern seaboard of North America, left to the secondary powers of Holland and England, was less prized because of its lack of gold, but proved to be much more valuable.
Though we can see the folly of thinking of gold as real wealth when we examine historical examples, the deception continues to trip up governments: look at the indemnity imposed upon a defeated Germany in the wake of the Great War. The German reparations had to be paid in goods, but this implied that Germany was required to maintain what is considered to be a favorable balance of trade with the Allies; that is, the Allies were doing what their economic thinking took to be a favor for redeveloping Germany. Further, domestic producers in the Allied nations did not welcome competition from those German repayments-in-kind. The Allied view was that Germany had to pay, but any particular method of payment was unacceptable to the Allies. [Later, on pages 52-53, Russell presents a single-individual, Robinson Crusoe version of the Allies’ behavior, to sharpen its absurdity.]
“To this lunatic situation a lunatic solution was found [p. 51].” The Allies lent Germany the money to pay the reparations. No domestic industries were directly hurt, and the notion that Germany was being punished for its transgressions was maintained. The cycle was extended when Germany was loaned funds with which to make the interest payments on its earlier loans. When the limits to these sorts of machinations were reached, bankruptcies spread throughout the system, and the global depression, which had many other stimulants, ensued.
The Allies first took the viewpoint of consumers when they pressed for German reparations, but then they realized that Allied producers might not be so enthralled with the whole idea. Their shift in roles resulted in the crazy pay-only-in-a-useless-fashion compromise, one that would be seen as evidence of insanity in an individual, but is taken to be wisdom when pursued at the national level. Robinson Crusoe would welcome the option to specialize in the production of some goods and to trade for others – his living standards will be low if he must make himself everything that he consumes. But somehow nations feel they need to have domestic capacity in all industries. A rational plan for production, one that included retraining for workers departing from declining industries, would avoid this costly devotion to autarky – but such rationality is “contrary to business orthodoxy [p. 53].”
The mythologies connected to gold are surprisingly common. French enmity for Britain forced the British off of the gold standard, which was the proper economic policy, but one that was widely viewed as shameful in Britain. The whole “dig up gold in one place so it can be stored underground elsewhere” industry is quite absurd. [Russell reiterates this observation in Unpopular Essays.] “Nevertheless it is still supposed that, by some hocus-pocus, everybody’s financial stability depends upon a hoard of gold in the central bank of his country [p. 55].” Sometimes the gold can be in one country’s vault, but designated as being owned by another country. It would be simpler just to pretend that the gold had been mined without disturbing it from its original resting place. [Echoes here of "The Island of Stone Money."]
The notion that a gold standard commits governments to prudent monetary policy is misplaced; in a pinch, a government will adjust or suspend the standard, and override the commitment. All the warring parties in Europe depreciated their currencies post-conflict and hence diminished the real value of their debt, sometimes to the point of hyper-inflation making debt payments worthless. The Russians were forthright about debt repudiation, while the depreciating or inflating nations paid lip service to propriety. Countries, like people, repay debts when and only when it serves their interests. Domestic debt is particularly susceptible to strategic governmental behavior, as the nominal value of the domestic currency can be manipulated by the state. Repudiation of international debt is held in check, imperfectly, by the threat of hostile reactions from the debtor nations.
Ownership of property is generally due to military might. Look at how New York changed hands between Native Americans, the Dutch, the English, and the Americans. Natural resources discovered in poor countries have a tendency to fall under the control of powerful nations, with arms either directly or tacitly involved. Similarly, powerful nations, if they are debtors, can get away with not repaying. The only path to currency stability is not a tenuous gold standard, but a world government with military capabilities. Such a global state could provide stable money by guaranteeing the price of a standard commodity bundle, and would have a direct interest to do so. [I believe that Russell’s belief in the stability of such a currency is misplaced; see this paper by Paul Krugman -- RBR.] The fact that business people do not support a single central bank and a world currency is evidence that they are willing to trade their own prosperity in exchange for keeping foreigners poor.
Our psychological responses to buying and selling seem to ignore the fact that we cannot directly consume money, and that it is consumption, not production, that is the ultimate goal. “In almost every transaction, the seller is more pleased than the buyer [p. 58].” The psychic superiority of selling comes from our love of power, which for many, but by no means all people, exceeds our desire for pleasure. Those who do desire power more than pleasure, however, set the tone in our competitive times. Governments inherit these skewed ideas from the movers and shakers, with the nonsensical result that all countries desire to sell but not to buy.
Sellers care about consumers and competitors. But consumers are numerous, while competitors are few and known, so producers end up focused on their competitors, who, after all, are a source of harm. When those competitors are foreign, the focus is, if anything, more intense. Other countries are viewed more as economic foes than as potential customers, lending a stimulus to the imposition of tariffs. Countries are like a butcher in a small town, whose enmity for the other butchers in town is so outsized that he embarks on a successful mission to turn the entire town into vegetarians – and ruins himself along with the targets of his wrath. Hatred of foreigners similarly renders countries unable to see that those foreigners who sell to them also, directly or indirectly, are their customers.
In Britain, the longstanding conflict between the rich and the poor has shrouded the fact that rich bankers have interests that also are opposed to the interests of rich industrialists. The political success of the financial sector in the banks v. manufacturers rivalry almost ruined the country.
The divergence between the interest of the finance sector with that of society is a more general phenomenon. [Russell noted this disconnect in 1919 in Proposed Roads to Freedom.] Running a country to promote the interests of financiers is like running a museum to benefit the curator, who might profit most by selling off the holdings. The profit motive, in many instances, serves society’s interests, but the profit motive within the financial sector now does not do so, even if it has done so in the past. Regulation is needed to ensure that finance serves the interest of industry – which generally is more closely aligned with the public interest – instead of serving its own, parochial desires.
Superstitions are used by the powerful few to control the subordinate many. In the past, superstitions have been promulgated to aid the power of priests and kings. Now, the superstitions surrounding gold protect the rule of the financiers. Ordinary people are dazzled by the jargon, and associate larger gold reserves with more security. The subservience to financiers is protected by more than just the gold standard, however. They are wealthy, and wealthy people are in a position to influence academic and public opinion, and serve as natural leaders for those who fear communism. The superstitions concerning gold might be crucial to the insulation of the financial sector from normal democratic scrutiny.
Economics is of fundamental importance, but schoolchildren are not taught economics, and even most college students do not study it. Those who do usually receive the finance-biased, fanciful version which leads to support for the status quo: “superstition and mystery are useful to the holders of financial power [p. 62].”
Proficiency in finance is unfortunately akin to proficiency in arms, in that those who possess such expertise tend to have views that are not consonant with the public interest. They are obstacles to progress, not consciously, but because their profession biases their judgment. Broader and improved economics and social science education can help to counter the influence of these biases. Presumably such an educational reform would be welcomed by any friend of democracy, though such friends now appear to be rather scarce.
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