Ideas that have helped Mankind

Bertrand Russell

B efore we can discuss this subject we must form some conception as

to the kind of effect that we consider a help to mankind. Are mankind

helped when they become more numerous? Or when they become less

like animals? Or when they become happier? Or when they learn to

enjoy a greater diversity of experiences? Or when they come to know

more? Or when they become more friendly to one another? I think all

these things come into our conception of what helps mankind, and I

will say a preliminary word about them.

T he most indubitable respect in which ideas have helped mankind is

numbers. There must have been a time when homo sapiens was a

very rare species, subsisting precariously in jungles and caves,

terrified of wild beasts, having difficulty in securing nourishment. At

this period the biological advantage of his greater intelligence, which

was cumulative because it could be handed on from generation to

generation, had scarcely begun to outweigh the disadvantages of his

long infancy, his lessened agility as compared with monkeys, and his

lack of hirsute protection against cold. In those days, the number of

men must certainly have been very small. The main use to which,

throughout the ages, men have put their technical skill has been to

increase the total population. I do not mean that this was the

intention, but that it was, in fact, the effect. If this is something to

rejoice in, then we have occasion to rejoice.

W e have also become, in certain respects, progressively less like

animals. I can think in particular of two respects: first, that acquired,

as opposed to congenital, skills play a continually increasing part in

human life, and, secondly, that forethought more and more dominates

impulse. In these respects we have certainly become progressively

less like animals.

A s to happiness, I am not so sure. Birds, it is true, die of hunger in

large numbers during the winter, if they are not birds of passage. But

during the summer they do not foresee this catastrophe, or remember

how nearly it befell them in the previous winter. With human beings

the matter is otherwise. I doubt whether the percentage of birds that

will have died of hunger during the present winter (1946-7) is as great

as the percentage of human beings that will have died from this cause

in India and central Europe during the same period. But every human

death by starvation is preceded by a long period of anxiety, and

surrounded by the corresponding anxiety of neighbors. We suffer not

only the evils that actually befall us, but all those that our intelligence

tells us we have reason to fear. The curbing of impulses to which we

are led by forethought averts physical disaster at the cost of worry,

and general lack of joy. I do not think that the learned men of my

acquaintance, even when they enjoy a secure income, are as happy as

the mice that eat the crumbs from their tables while the erudite

gentlemen snooze. In this respect, therefore, I am not convinced that

there has been any progress at all.

A s to diversity of enjoyments, however, the matter is otherwise. I

remember reading an account of some lions who were taken to a

movie showing the successful depredations of lions in a wild state, but

none of them got any pleasure from the spectacle. Not only music, and

poetry and science, but football and baseball and alcohol, afford no

pleasure to animals. Our intelligence has, therefore, certainly enabled

us to get a much greater variety of enjoyment than is open to animals,

but we have purchased this advantage at the expense of a much

greater liability to boredom.

B ut I shall be told that it is neither numbers nor multiplicity of

pleasures that makes the glory of man. It is his intellectual and moral

qualities. It is obvious that we know more than animals do, and it is

common to consider this one of our advantages. Whether it is, in fact,

an advantage, may be doubted. But at any rate it is something that

distinguishes us from the brutes.

H as civilization taught us to be more friendly towards one another?

The answer is easy. Robins (the English, not the American species)

peck an elderly robin to death, whereas men (the English, not the

American species) give an elderly man an oldage pension. Within the

herd we are more friendly to each other than are many species of

animals, but in our attitude towards those outside the herd, in spite of

all that has been done by moralists and religious teachers, our

emotions are as ferocious as those of any animal, and our intelligence

enables us to give them a scope which is denied to even the most

savage beast. It may be hoped, though not very confidently, that the

more humane attitude will in time come to prevail, but so far the

omens are not very propitious.

A ll these different elements must be borne in mind in considering

what ideas have done most to help mankind. The ideas with which we

shall be concerned may be broadly divided into two kinds: those that

contribute to knowledge and technique, and those that are concerned

with morals and politics. I will treat first those that have to do with

knowledge and technique.

T he most important and difficult steps were taken before the dawn of

history. At what stage language began is not known, but we may be

pretty certain that it began very gradually. Without it it would have

been very difficult to hand on from generation to generation the

inventions and discoveries that were gradually made.

A nother great step, which may have come either before or after the

beginning of language, was the utilization of fire. I suppose that at first

fire was chiefly used to keep away wild beasts while our ancestors

slept, but the warmth must have been found agreeable. Presumably

on some occasion a child got scolded for throwing the meat into the

fire, but when it was taken out it was found to be much better, and so

the long history of cookery began.

T he taming of domestic animals, especially the cow and the sheep,

must have made life much pleasanter and more secure. Some

anthropologists have an attractive theory that the utility of domestic

animals was not foreseen, but that people attempted to tame

whatever animal their religion taught them to worship. The tribes that

worshiped lions and crocodiles died out, while those to whom the cow

or the sheep was a sacred animal prospered. I like this theory, and in

the entire absence of evidence, for or against it, I feel at liberty to play

with it.

E ven more important than the domestication of animals was the

invention of agriculture, which, however, introduced bloodthirsty

practices into religion that lasted for many centuries. Fertility rites

tended to involve human sacrifice and cannibalism. Moloch would not

help the corn to grow unless he was allowed to feast on the blood of

children. A similar opinion was adopted by the Evangelicals of

Manchester in the early days of industrialism, when they kept six-year-

old children working twelve to fourteen hours a day, in conditions that

caused most of them to die. It has now been discovered that grain will

grow, and cotton goods can be manufactured, without being watered

by the blood of infants. In the case of the grain, the discovery took

thousands of years; in the case of the cotton goods hardly a century.

So perhaps there is some evidence of progress in the world.

T he last of the great pre-historic inventions was the art of writing,

which was indeed a pre-requisite of history. Writing, like speech,

developed gradually, and in the form of pictures designed to convey a

message it was probably as old as speech, but from pictures to syllable

writing and thence to the alphabet was a very slow evolution. In China

the last step was never taken.

C oming to historic times, we find that the earliest important steps

were taken in mathematics and astronomy, both of which began in

Babylonia some millennia before the beginning of our era. Learning in

Babylonia seems, however, to have become stereotyped and non-

progressive, long before the Greeks first came into contact with it. It is

to the Greeks that we owe ways of thinking and investigating that

have ever since been found fruitful. In the prosperous Greek

commercial cities, rich men living on slave labor were brought by the

processes of trade into contact with many nations, some quite

barbarous, others fairly civilized. What the civilized nations - the

Babylonians and Egyptians - had to offer the Greeks quickly

assimilated. They became critical of their own traditional customs, by

perceiving them to be at once analogous to, and different from, the

customs of surrounding inferior people, and so by the sixth century BC

some of them achieved a degree of enlightened rationalism which

cannot be surpassed in the present day. Xenophanes observed that

men make gods in their own image - 'the Ethiopians make their gods

black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red

hair: Yes, and if oxen and lions and horses had hands, and could paint

with their hands, and produced works of art as men do, horses would

paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen and make their

bodies in the image of their several kinds.'

S ome Greeks used their emancipation from tradition in the pursuit of

mathematics and astronomy, in both of which they made the most

amazing progress. Mathematics was not used by the Greeks, as it is by

the moderns, to facilitate industrial processes; it was a 'gentlemanly'

pursuit, valued for its own sake as giving eternal truth, and a super-

sensible standard by which the visible world was condemned as

second-rate. Only Archimedes foreshadowed the modern use of

mathematics by inventing engines of war for the defence of Syracuse

against the Romans. A Roman soldier killed him and the

mathematicians retired again into their ivory tower.

A stronomy, which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pursued

with ardor, largely because of its usefulness in navigation, was

pursued by the Greeks with no regard for practical utility, except

when, in later antiquity, it became associated with astrology. At a very

early stage they discovered the earth to be round and made a fairly

accurate estimate of its size They discovered ways of calculating the

distance of the sun and moon, and Aristarchus of Samos even evolved

the complete Copernican hypothesis, but his views were rejected by all

his followers except one, and after the third century BC no very

important progress was made. At the time of the Renaissance,

however, something of what the Greeks had done became known, and

greatly facilitated the rise of modem science.

T he Greeks had the conception of natural law, and acquired the habit

of expressing natural laws in mathematical terms. These ideas have

provided the key to a very great deal of the understanding of the

physical world that has been achieved in modern times. But many of

them, including Aristotle, were misled by a belief that science could

make a fruitful use of the idea of purpose. Aristotle distinguished four

kinds of cause, of which only two concern us, the 'efficient' cause and

the 'final' cause. The 'efficient' cause is what we should call simply the

cause. The 'final' cause is the purpose. For instance, if, in the course of

a tramp in the mountains, you find an inn just when your thirst has

become unendurable, the efficient cause of the inn is the actions of the

bricklayers that built it, while its final cause is the satisfaction of your

thirst. If someone were to ask 'why is there an inn there?' it would be

equally appropriate to answer 'because someone had it built there' or

'because many thirsty travelers pass that way'. One is an explanation

by the 'efficient' cause and the other by the 'final' cause. Where

human affairs are concerned, the explanation by 'final' cause is often

appropriate, since human actions have purposes. But where inanimate

nature is concerned, only 'efficient' causes have been found

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