Produced by Gordon Keener.
POLITICAL IDEALS
by
Bertrand Russell
CONTENTS
I: Political Ideals
II: Capitalism and the Wage System
III: Pitfalls in Socialism
IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control
V: National Independence and Internationalism
Chapter I: Political Ideals
In dark days, men need a clear faith and a well-grounded hope; and as
the outcome of these, the calm courage which takes no account of
hardships by the way. The times through which we are passing have
afforded to many of us a confirmation of our faith. We see that the
things we had thought evil are really evil, and we know more
definitely than we ever did before the directions in which men must
move if a better world is to arise on the ruins of the one which is
now hurling itself into destruction. We see that men's political
dealings with one another are based on wholly wrong ideals, and can
only be saved by quite different ideals from continuing to be a source
of suffering, devastation, and sin.
Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life.
The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good
as possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside
or above the various men, women, and children who compose the world.
The problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in
such a way that each severally may have as much of good in his
existence as possible. And this problem requires that we should first
consider what it is that we think good in the individual life.
To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to
lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by
some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the
impatient administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his
opinion, and turning out a set of pupils all of whom will give the
same definite answer on a doubtful point. Mr. Bernard Shaw is said to
hold that _Troilus and Cressida_ is the best of Shakespeare's plays.
Although I disagree with this opinion, I should welcome it in a pupil
as a sign of individuality; but most teachers would not tolerate such
a heterodox view. Not only teachers, but all commonplace persons in
authority, desire in their subordinates that kind of uniformity which
makes their actions easily predictable and never inconvenient. The
result is that they crush initiative and individuality when they can,
and when they cannot, they quarrel with it.
It is not one ideal for all men, but a separate ideal for each
separate man, that has to be realized if possible. Every man has it
in his being to develop into something good or bad: there is a best
possible for him, and a worst possible. His circumstances will
determine whether his capacities for good are developed or crushed,
and whether his bad impulses are strengthened or gradually diverted
into better channels.
But although we cannot set up in any detail an ideal of character
which is to be universally applicable--although we cannot say, for
instance, that all men ought to be industrious, or self-sacrificing,
or fond of music--there are some broad principles which can be used to
guide our estimates as to what is possible or desirable.
We may distinguish two sorts of goods, and two corresponding sorts of
impulses. There are goods in regard to which individual possession is
possible, and there are goods in which all can share alike. The food
and clothing of one man is not the food and clothing of another; if
the supply is insufficient, what one man has is obtained at the
expense of some other man. This applies to material goods generally,
and therefore to the greater part of the present economic life of the
world. On the other hand, mental and spiritual goods do not belong to
one man to the exclusion of another. If one man knows a science, that
does not prevent others from knowing it; on the contrary, it helps
them to acquire the knowledge. If one man is a great artist or poet,
that does not prevent others from painting pictures or writing poems,
but helps to create the atmosphere in which such things are possible.
If one man is full of good-will toward others, that does not mean that
there is less good-will to be shared among the rest; the more
good-will one man has, the more he is likely to create among others.
In such matters there is no _possession_, because there is not a
definite amount to be shared; any increase anywhere tends to produce
an increase everywhere.
There are two kinds of impulses, corresponding to the two kinds of
goods. There are _possessive_ impulses, which aim at acquiring or
retaining private goods that cannot be shared; these center in the
impulse of property. And there are _creative_ or constructive impulses,
which aim at bringing into the world or making available for use the
kind of goods in which there is no privacy and no possession.
The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the
largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new
discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we
eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?"
The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more
importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by
thinking of these things is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy,
domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral evils that infest the
world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force.
Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber.
Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. You may kill an
artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought.
You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you
will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force
is impotent in such matters; it is only as regards material goods that
it is effective. For this reason the men who believe in force are the
men whose thoughts and desires are preoccupied with material goods.
The possessive impulses, when they are strong, infect activities which
ought to be purely creative. A man who has made some valuable
discovery may be filled with jealousy of a rival discoverer. If one
man has found a cure for cancer and another has found a cure for
consumption, one of them may be delighted if the other man's discovery
turns out a mistake, instead of regretting the suffering of patients
which would otherwise have been avoided. In such cases, instead of
desiring knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of its
usefulness, a man is desiring it as a means to reputation. Every
creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the
aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the more successful saint.
Most affection is accompanied by some tinge of jealousy, which is a
possessive impulse intruding into the creative region. Worst of all,
in this direction, is the sheer envy of those who have missed
everything worth having in life, and who are instinctively bent on
preventing others from enjoying what they have not had. There is
often much of this in the attitude of the old toward the young.
There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural
impulse of growth, and this is just as true of mental as of physical
development. Physical development is helped by air and nourishment
and exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment which made
Chinese women's feet small. In just the same way mental development
may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside
influences that help are those that merely provide encouragement or
mental food or opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The
influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by
applying any kind of force, whether discipline or authority or fear or
the tyranny of public opinion or the necessity of engaging in some
totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences are those
that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse, which is what shows
itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such influences are likely
to do a man an inward danger from which he will never recover.
Those who realize the harm that can be done to others by any use of
force against them, and the worthlessness of the goods that can be
acquired by force, will be very full of respect for the liberty of
others; they will not try to bind them or fetter them; they will be
slow to judge and swift to sympathize; they will treat every human
being with a kind of tenderness, because the principle of good in him
is at once fragile and infinitely precious. They will not condemn
those who are unlike themselves; they will know and feel that
individuality brings differences and uniformity means death. They
will wish each human being to be as much a living thing and as little
a mechanical product as it is possible to be; they will cherish in
each one just those things which the harsh usage of a ruthless world
would destroy. In one word, all their dealings with others will be
inspired by a deep impulse of _reverence_.
What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative
impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession;
reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in
ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is
necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward
defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the
hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward
or inward obstacles it may encounter. So far as it lies in a man's
own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has
three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for
others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself.
Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm
that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather
than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence
between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect?
In all these ways the institutions under which we live are very far
indeed from what they ought to be.
Institutions, and especially economic systems, have a profound
influence in molding the characters of men and women. They may
encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety.
They may open men's minds to great possibilities, or close them
against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make
a man's happiness depend upon what he adds to the general possessions
of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private
goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the
wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or
exceptionally fortunate.
Men's impulses are molded, partly by their native disposition, partly
by opportunity and environment, especially early environment. Direct
preaching can do very little to change impulses, though it can lead
people to restrain the direct expression of them, often with the
result that the impulses go underground and come to the surface again
in some contorted form. When we have discovered what kinds of impulse
we desire, we must not rest content with preaching, or with trying to
produce the outward manifestation without the inner spring; we must
try rather to alter institutions in the way that will, of itself,
modify the life of impulse in the desired direction.
At present our institutions rest upon two things: property and power.
Both of these are very unjustly distributed; both, in the actual
world, are of great importance to the happiness of the individual.
Both are possessive goods; yet without them many of the goods in which
all might share are hard to acquire as things are now.
Without property, as things are, a man has no freedom, and no security
for the necessities of a tolerable life; without power, he has no
opportunity for initiative. If men are to have free play for their
creative impulses, they must be liberated from sordid cares by a
certain measure of security, and they must have a sufficient share of
power to be able to exercise initiative as regards the course and
conditions of their lives.
Few men can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a
world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority
would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the
acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are
given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and
consecrates the injustice of those who have toward those who have not.
In such an environment even those whom nature has endowed with great
creative gifts become infected with the poison of competition. Men
combine in groups to attain more strength in the scramble for material
goods, and loyalty to the group spreads a halo of quasi-idealism round
the central impulse of greed. Trade-unions and the Labor party are no
more exempt from this vice than other parties and other sections of
society; though they are largely inspired by the hope of a radically
better world. They are too often led astray by the immediate object
of securing for themselves a large share of material goods. That this
desire is in accordance with justice, it is impossible to deny; but
something larger and more constructive is needed as a political ideal,
if the victors of to-morrow are not to become the oppressors of the
day after. The inspiration and outcome of a reforming movement ought
to be freedom and a generous spirit, not niggling restrictions and
regulations.
The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a
small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have,
almost always, very little choice as to their activities when once
they have selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the
power that moves the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the
machinery. Despite political democracy, there is still an
extraordinary degree of difference in the power of self-direction
belonging to a capitalist and to a man who has to earn his living.
Economic affairs touch men's lives, at most times, much more
intimately than political questions. At present the man who has no
capital usually has to sell himself to some large organization, such
as a railway company, for example. He has no voice in its management,
and no liberty in politics except what his trade-union can secure for
him. If he happens to desire a form of liberty which is not thought
important by his trade-union, he is powerless; he must submit or
starve.
Exactly the same thing happens to professional men. Probably a
majority of journalists are engaged in writing for newspapers whose
politics they disagree with; only a man of wealth can own a large
newspaper, and only an accident can enable the point of view or the
interests of those who are not wealthy to find expression in a
newspaper. A large part of the best brains of the country are in the
civil service, where the condition of their employment is silence
about the evils which cannot be concealed from them. A Nonconformist
minister loses his livelihood if his views displease his congregation;
a member of Parliament loses his seat if he is not sufficiently supple
or sufficiently stupid to follow or share all the turns and twists of
public opinion. In every walk of life, independence of mind is
punished by failure, more and more as economic organizations grow
larger and more rigid. Is it surprising that men become increasingly
docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego the
right of thinking for themselves? Yet along such lines civilization
can only sink into a Byzantine immobility.
Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life
can grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of
most wage-earners. The hope of possessing more wealth and power than
any man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich,
is quite as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds
against justice, and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on
social questions while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily
feel that their pleasures are bought by the miseries of others. The
injustices of destitution and wealth alike ought to be rendered
impossible. Then a great fear would be removed from the lives of the
many, and hope would have to take on a better form in the lives of the
few.
But security and liberty are only the negative conditions for good
political institutions. When they have been won, we need also the
positive condition: encouragement of creative energy. Security alone
might produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness
as its counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest
of life, and the movement toward perpetually new and better things.
There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those
that most encourage progress toward others still better. Without
effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a
finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination
and hope are alive and active.
It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from
excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing
ever happened or changed. Fatigue produces the illusion that only
rest is needed for happiness; but when men have rested for a time,
boredom drives them to renewed activity. For this reason, a happy
life must be one in which there is activity. If it is also to be a
useful life, the activity ought to be as far as possible creative, not
merely predatory or defensive. But creative activity requires
imagination and originality, which are apt to be subversive of the
_status quo_. At present, those who have power dread a disturbance of
the _status quo_, lest their unjust privileges should be taken away.
In combination with the instinct for conventionality,[1] which man
shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the
existing order have established a system which punishes originality
and starves imagination from the moment of first going to school down
to the time of death and burial. The whole spirit in which education
is conducted needs to be changed, in order that children may be
encouraged to think and feel for themselves, not to acquiesce
passively in the thoughts and feelings of others. It is not rewards
after the event that will produce initiative, but a certain mental
atmosphere. There have been times when such an atmosphere existed:
the great days of Greece, and Elizabethan England, may serve as
examples. But in our own day the tyranny of vast machine-like
organizations, governed from above by men who know and care little for
the lives of those whom they control, is killing individuality and
freedom of mind, and forcing men more and more to conform to a uniform
pattern.
[1] In England this is called "a sense of humor."
Vast organizations are an inevitable element in modern life, and it is
useless to aim at their abolition, as has been done by some reformers,
for instance, William Morris. It is true that they make the
preservation of individuality more difficult, but what is needed is a
way of combining them with the greatest possible scope for individual
initiative.
One very important step toward this end would be to render democratic
the government of every organization. At present, our legislative
institutions are more or less democratic, except for the important
fact that women are excluded. But our administration is still purely
bureaucratic, and our economic organizations are monarchical or
oligarchic. Every limited liability company is run by a small number
of self-appointed or coöpted directors. There can be no real
freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also
control its management.
Another measure which would do much to increase liberty would be an
increase of self-government for subordinate groups, whether
geographical or economic or defined by some common belief, like
religious sects. A modern state is so vast and its machinery is so
little understood that even when a man has a vote he does not feel
himself any effective part of the force which determines its policy.
Except in matters where he can act in conjunction with an
exceptionally powerful group, he feels himself almost impotent, and
the government remains a remote impersonal circumstance, which must be
simply endured, like the weather. By a share in the control of
smaller bodies, a man might regain some of that sense of personal
opportunity and responsibility which belonged to the citizen of a
city-state in ancient Greece or medieval Italy.
When any group of men has a strong corporate consciousness--such as
belongs, for example, to a nation or a trade or a religious
body--liberty demands that it should be free to decide for itself all
matters which are of great importance to the outside world. This is
the basis of the universal claim for national independence. But
nations are by no means the only groups which ought to have
self-government for their internal concerns. And nations, like other
groups, ought not to have complete liberty of action in matters which
are of equal concern to foreign nations. Liberty demands
self-government, but not the right to interfere with others. The
greatest degree of liberty is not secured by anarchy. The
reconciliation of liberty with government is a difficult problem, but
it is one which any political theory must face.
The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law
to secure certain ends which the holders of power consider desirable.
The coercion of an individual or a group by force is always in itself
more or less harmful. But if there were no government, the result
would not be an absence of force in men's relations to each other; it
would merely be the exercise of force by those who had strong
predatory instincts, necessitating either slavery or a perpetual
readiness to repel force with force on the part of those whose
instincts were less violent. This is the state of affairs at present
in international relations, owing to the fact that no international
government exists. The results of anarchy between states should
suffice to persuade us that anarchism has no solution to offer for the
evils of the world.
There is probably one purpose, and only one, for which the use of
force by a government is beneficent, and that is to diminish the total
amount of force used m the world. It is clear, for example, that the
legal prohibition of murder diminishes the total amount of violence in
the world. And no one would maintain that parents should have
unlimited freedom to ill-treat their children. So long as some men
wish to do violence to others, there cannot be complete liberty, for
either the wish to do violence must be restrained, or the victims must
be left to suffer. For this reason, although individuals and
societies should have the utmost freedom as regards their own affairs,
they ought not to have complete freedom as regards their dealings with
others. To give freedom to the strong to oppress the weak is not the
way to secure the greatest possible amount of freedom in the world.
This is the basis of the socialist revolt against the kind of freedom
which used to be advocated by _laissez-faire_ economists.
Democracy is a device--the best so far invented--for diminishing as
much as possible the interference of governments with liberty. If a
nation is divided into two sections which cannot both have their way,
democracy theoretically insures that the majority shall have their
way. But democracy is not at all an adequate device unless it is
accompanied by a very great amount of devolution. Love of uniformity,
or the mere pleasure of interfering, or dislike of differing tastes
and temperaments, may often lead a majority to control a minority in
matters which do not really concern the majority. We should none of
us like to have the internal affairs of Great Britain settled by a
parliament of the world, if ever such a body came into existence.
Nevertheless, there are matters which such a body could settle much
better than any existing instrument of government.
The theory of the legitimate use of force in human affairs, where a
government exists, seems clear. Force should only be used against
those who attempt to use force against others, or against those who
will not respect the law in cases where a common decision is necessary
and a minority are opposed to the action of the majority. These seem
legitimate occasions for the use of force; and they should be
legitimate occasions in international affairs, if an international
government existed. The problem of the legitimate occasions for the
use of force in the absence of a government is a different one, with
which we are not at present concerned.
Although a government must have the power to use force, and may on
occasion use it legitimately, the aim of the reformers to have such
institutions as will diminish the need for actual coercion will be
found to have this effect. Most of us abstain, for instance, from
theft, not because it is illegal, but because we feel no desire to
steal. The more men learn to live creatively rather than
possessively, the less their wishes will lead them to thwart others or
to attempt violent interference with their liberty. Most of the
conflicts of interests, which lead individuals or organizations into
disputes, are purely imaginary, and would be seen to be so if men
aimed more at the goods in which all can share, and less at those
private possessions that are the source of strife. In proportion as
men live creatively, they cease to wish to interfere with others by
force. Very many matters in which, at present, common action is
thought indispensable, might well be left to individual decision. It
used to be thought absolutely necessary that all the inhabitants of a
country should have the same religion, but we now know that there is
no such necessity. In like manner it will be found, as men grow more
tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon
are useless and even harmful.
Good political institutions would weaken the impulse toward force and
domination in two ways: first, by increasing the opportunities for the
creative impulses, and by shaping education so as to strengthen these
impulses; secondly, by diminishing the outlets for the possessive
instincts. The diffusion of power, both in the political and the
economic sphere, instead of its concentration in the hands of
officials and captains of industry, would greatly diminish the
opportunities for acquiring the habit of command, out of which the
desire for exercising tyranny is apt to spring. Autonomy, both for
districts and for organizations, would leave fewer occasions when
governments were called upon to make decisions as to other people's
concerns. And the abolition of capitalism and the wage system would
remove the chief incentive to fear and greed, those correlative
passions by which all free life is choked and gagged.
Few men seem to realize how many of the evils from which we suffer are
wholly unnecessary, and that they could be abolished by a united
effort within a few years. If a majority in every civilized country
so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty,
quite half the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which
binds down nine tenths of our population; we could fill the world with
beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace. It is only
because men are apathetic that this is not achieved, only because
imagination is sluggish, and what always has been is regarded as what
always must be. With good-will, generosity, intelligence, these
things could be brought about.